


Doctor Who and the Exodus of the Daleks

by mary_pseud



Series: Damnatio Memoriae [21]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alien Invasion, Don't copy to other sites, Eternals, Gallifrey, Gen, Mind Control, TARDIS - Freeform, alternative universe, enlightenment, transcendence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 36,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23674003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mary_pseud/pseuds/mary_pseud
Summary: The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are forced to confront an old enemy with very new plans for revenge. Gallifrey has been overrun by Daleks led by a rejuvenated Davros, and unless the Doctor can stop him, an uncanny Harvest will transform Davros into an all-powerful Eternal!This story takes place in the same time frame as 'Resurrection of the Daleks' and may contain spoilers for that episode, and also 'The Five Doctors' and 'Enlightenment.'
Relationships: Davros & Nyder & Ravon, Fifth Doctor & Davros, Fifth Doctor & Tegan Jovanka, Fifth Doctor & Vislor Turlough
Series: Damnatio Memoriae [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/91891
Kudos: 1





	1. Caught

Setting a trap for a person who travels in both time and space is quite simple. Create the appropriate bait, any time, any place: eventually the prey will sense that bait and be captured.

The Daleks knew what bait would be most appropriate for the prey they sought. They had studied time travel and time war, in several variations: artron torque, reflectile projection, timescoops. For this particular bait, they were constructing a time corridor.

The corridor stretched through the Vortex, an invisible finger of fire spanning both the years and the light-years. One end of the time corridor was anchored on a small green world, rich in life. The other end was not fixed; it wavered across nearly half a degree of galactic arc. But the averaged calculation of its location would have placed it very close to a certain planet in the constellation of Kasterborous.

Both of these planets were of interest to the Doctor. And therefore, of interest to the Daleks.

After the corridor was built, the Daleks scattered in their great ships like shy spiders. They observed their surroundings, they attacked those who attacked them, and they experimented with revelling in several dimensions. They met alien races, mapped far star systems. They refined themselves. And they waited. Waited for when and where a certain entity would enter their web of a single strand, and the shuddering of his passage would resonate, drawing them to him.

* * *

"I can't free the TARDIS from the time corridor!" shouted the Doctor, clawing at the control panels as they and the entire control room unexpectedly tipped from the horizontal. The TARDIS was shaking like a jellyfish in a whirlpool.

"Isn't there anything you can do?" pleaded Tegan, as she tried to retrieve Turlough from the wall where he had been hurtled by the time craft's shaking. His normally pale face was even paler, and she wasn't feeling very well herself.

"No, too much turbulence. We can't materialise **,** we're risking breakup." The Doctor shook his hair out of his eyes and moved another control, then two in sync, but the ship kept tumbling.

The Cloister Bell gave its deep chortling ring, signalling the TARDIS' peril. Tegan tensed, clinging to the control panel tight enough to whiten her fingers.

"What are you waiting for?" Turlough demanded, his eyes flickering over the TARDIS' displays. "We can't take much more of this."

The Doctor adjusted another control. "The time stress varies, I'm waiting for the right moment to break free. And - here it is. Hang on!"

He hit several controls in quick succession, and the Cloister Bell seemed to ring in all three of them; the ship and its occupants shivered, every bolt and panel and nerve and cell starting to grind and lurch to break free of the rest.

* * *

The Bell was not heard only in the TARDIS. Across time and space, on hundreds or even thousands of Dalek ships, the warning was heard. The intercept forces prepared themselves, charging their weapons, downloading the latest and most refined battle plans. Signals were sent and received.

And not only Daleks heard and responded. Certain vital non-Dalek personnel were notified, woken, recalled, or released from the stasis fields that had held them frozen in time, waiting for this one most precious day.

Kaled scientists started their program routines and brought their equipment online. Tremendous mechanical constructs in great irregular shapes like reefs of grinding steel were powered and primed, aligned and focussed.

Kaled troops grinned, teeth bright against space-tanned faces or pale ones, as they took up their weapons. Others ran fingers over weapons controls, double-checked defensive systems, prepared their minds and bodies. Some pulled out tokens of the Horned God from under their clothes, cupping them in their hands as though to keep them warm, and kissed them, asking for His strength. They mustered for the battle of their lives. Literally.

* * *

The TARDIS seemed not to stop, but rather to congeal. Tegan could free one hand from its death grip on the console, to rub at her churning stomach. "Are we loose?" she asked weakly.

"Yes. Now we need to find out where that time corridor is heading."

"Can't we just leave it?" Turlough asked, fidgeting with his school tie.

"What? Nonsense, it would be like leaving an electrified cable stretched across a dark room. At knee height," he added, as he scanned the TARDIS' displays. "We'll have to move parallel to the time corridor, find its endpoints," and then he just stared, his blue eyes seeming to cloud over.

"Doctor. Doctor, what's wrong?" Tegan had seen despair on the Doctor's face before, but not like this.

"Oh. Well, the time corridor has two ends. One of them appears to be anchored on Earth. Late twentieth century, to be exact."

"And the other end?"

"Ah. Well. The other end is not anchored, currently. But."

"But?"

"It's pointed straight at Gallifrey," he said faintly.

* * *

While the Doctor and his companions debated the meaning of the time corridor, a signal was pinging against the TARDIS; a signal that only she could hear.

The signal was not unexpected. The TARDIS knew what it meant. To the last possible iota of meaning, she knew what it meant. And she was sorry, so terribly sorry, as she replied.

* * *

"It's a trick," said Tegan hotly.

"It's a trap," said Turlough. "The Time Lords want you back on Gallifrey; they want to force you to be President. So they're threatening Earth…"

"No, Turlough, no. That's not their way."

"What, they don't threaten people?" Tegan's mouth was set in a hard line; she had recently been on Gallifrey, in the Death Zone, and she had found it quite intimidating - not that she would ever let it show.

"To threaten Earth - no, they would surely see that as interference."

"Then it's a trick," said Tegan again. "Who else could they be hoping to capture?"

The Doctor turned away from both of them, nervously running one hand through his flyaway blond hair. He stared blindly at the white wall of the TARDIS, and did not notice something very important happen. It was Turlough who saw that the time rotor had stopped.

"We've materialised," he said, moving back to the TARDIS controls.

"What?" said the Doctor, looking for himself. "You're right. We're dead in space. And-"

He touched another control, and the screen in front of him lit with a simplified display: a plain rectangle for the TARDIS, surrounded by many overlapping oval shapes.

"And what?" asked Tegan, staring at the mysterious screen.

The Doctor gave a slightly nervous grin. "And we're not alone." The TARDIS viewscreen opened, and all three of them looked up to see nothing.

Literally nothing; solid blackness.

"Where are the stars?" asked Tegan. "I thought you said we were in space."

"We are," replied Turlough. "But there are multiple objects around us."

"What sort of objects?"

A single point of light suddenly winked on the screen, and then was joined by a second. A string of lights, reminding Tegan of nothing so much as tiny lanterns in a ship's rigging. The lights formed an arc that became a giant circle.

And then another circle appeared.

And another.

Spaceships. Great saucer-shaped ships, clustered so thickly around the TARDIS that they blocked out the stars. They were motionless in relation to the box captured in the centre of their formation. They seemed to huddle together, close enough almost to touch, as though they were cold and the TARDIS was a tiny blue flame that could warm them.

Tegan shivered; for an instant she thought the Bell was striking again. It was impossible to judge exactly how big those ships were, but she had the unpleasant certainty that they were very, very big.

"I'm not recognising their design," said the Doctor, eyes dancing between four sets of outputs. "But there are a lot of concentrated energy sources inside them."

"Like - batteries?" Tegan asked.

"Like weapons," the Doctor said, his blue eyes grim.

"Doctor," said Turlough hesitantly.

"Not now, I need to find out their flight path, their planet of origin - if I can," said the Doctor, flipping more controls.

"Is that what you're asking them?"

"What?" the Doctor said, his eyebrows suddenly knit.

"Well, we're transmitting," said Turlough, pointing to a tiny readout in front of him, and a single flashing light.

The Doctor moved quickly, almost shoving Turlough aside. He stared at the light as he flicked two controls, three, five, held down two buttons and then shouted, "NO! Stop!"

"What's happening?" The control room suddenly plunged into darkness, then lit again before Tegan could catch her breath.

"The TARDIS is transmitting to those ships - its own personal transponder signal. And they're responding. I've got to stop it!" The Doctor flicked more controls, and then dove under the control panel, pulling his sonic screwdriver out of his tan coat's pocket and holding it, not like a tool, but like a weapon. He rolled onto his back and started loosening panels.

"Is there anything we can do?"

"Yes, Turlough. Try and break the signal, turn off the transmitter, divert the power, scramble it, encode it, anything!"

Turlough's white hands flicked at the TARDIS' controls again and again, but he was out of his depth, and whatever he did the TARDIS seemed to route around. He had always been fascinated by the Doctor's marvellous travel machine, moving at will in time and space. He sometimes thought of it - of her, as though she were alive, just as the Doctor appeared to. But now she seemed to be mocking him, teasing him, deliberately subverting and twisting and ignoring his every effort. Data streamed away under his fingertips, and he was helpless to stop it.

"Doctor, they're leaving!" said Tegan with joy in her voice. On the screen the saucers were drifting back, forming themselves into great squares or cubes. Those cubes were moving away, looking like a game of improbably regulated ring toss, and she could see the real stars now between them.

"I'm afraid they may have gotten what they wanted," said the Doctor, standing and then clenching his screwdriver in his fist for a moment. "The TARDIS transponder signal and identification codes."

"So - what?" Tegan asked. "Are they gonna run up bills on your charge card?"

The Doctor looked exasperated. "They didn't just get the transponder signal, Tegan. They captured everything they could get on Gallifrey's defences: the transduction barrier, the Citadel blueprints, everything. And with the transponder-"

"What's so special about the transponder signal?"

Turlough's voice was faintly supercilious - or maybe not so faintly. "I presume the Doctor is saying that they could pretend to be a TARDIS."

"Not just any TARDIS, Turlough. The President's TARDIS, the ship the High Council and Flavia are expecting back at any moment. They could send that signal, and Gallifrey would drop her defences. I must warn them."

The Doctor dematerialised the TARDIS, and with the rasp of the engines came another sensation: that of being pulled backwards through endless invisible layers of icy-cold wet velvet, sticking and smothering and tearing with their passage. The frozen rippling pressure squeezed against all of them, hard enough to bring tears to their eyes.

The TARDIS crew shouted, but only the Doctor's shout had any sense.

"Vortex magnetron!" he shouted. "It's got the TARDIS!"

Tegan crossed her bare arms over her chest, clenching her fists. Whatever was happening, it was not good.

* * *

The time rotor stopped, and they all seemed to hold their breath for a moment. Even the TARDIS was strangely silent.

"Where are we?" Turlough finally asked.

"We are - three days after we met the saucers in space. And we are on Gallifrey." The Doctor shook his head from side to side. "A vortex magnetron, set to drag us here and now - but why?"

"Maybe we shouldn't try and find out," Tegan offered, still feeling shivery and strange.

"No. We have to find that magnetron and deactivate it, or we'll just be hauled back to Gallifrey. And we have to warn the Council!" The Doctor touched the door controls and dashed through them, heedless of his companions' protests as they followed.

None of them noticed the tiny silver bead that rolled out of the TARDIS doors after them. It slid between two stone tiles and was gone.

"And this is?" Tegan asked doubtfully, looking around.

"I'd say this is the - the Citadel Second Ring Gardens," the Doctor replied, scanning the neat array of square pots, arranged in little groups of four and bearing plants with square leaves and neatly angled stems, all framed by a square room without windows. It was like a garden, except surrounded by cold stone and steel walls and lit by cold overhead lights. "It always seemed a bit overgroomed to me."

"Why are all the plants covered with wires?" Turlough asked as they picked through them, heading for the large doors. While the plants' leaves might be green or yellow or deep red, they were alike in being wrapped and caged in strands of silver wire.

"Those? Oh yes. The gardener has to maintain an elaborate mathematic model of how each plant is supposed to grow, you see. And if the plants don't match the model, well. It's not Gallifreyan, to change the model. So he, or she, binds the plants." The Doctor reached out and touched one particularly rambunctious-looking purple vine; it seemed to strain against the thick cable twisted around it, forcing it into a cube. "Always felt rather sorry for them, actually. Back in the day."

They had gotten to the doors now, great towering things three times the height of a man, and the Doctor pulled them open. "I just hope Commander Maxil isn't waiting for us," he said with a joking note in his voice.

"Who's Commander Maxil?" Tegan asked, following through the doors.

"Oh, a very stuffy member of the Citadel Guard, much too fond of his own helmet and breastplate and shooting people."

"Does he have curly blond hair?" Turlough asked from behind them.

The Doctor and Tegan stopped. "Yes," the Doctor said.

"Well, perhaps this is him."

They turned and saw Turlough leaning over in a particularly stiff way, as though trying to keep from touching the fallen figure that lay behind the door.

The Doctor and Tegan came back, and saw a man smothered and covered with a thick white blanket of what looked like paste. Its irregular edges adhered to the floor around him, and there was a translucent bubble of the stuff over his face, shivering a bit with his breath - at least, Tegan hoped it was his breath.

His round face was a bit slack, and his eyes were closed. He might have been asleep. His hair was matted to his forehead in sweat-stiff curls, and the edge of something metal showed under his chin.

"Maxil," the Doctor said softly, going on one knee. "Maxil, can you hear me? Maxil!"

Maxil just lay there. The Doctor leaned forward, sniffing.

"Whatever this stuff is, it smells - augh!" he shouted, shoving himself to his feet and then flailing to keep from going over onto his back. The blanket had reared as he leaned close, sending tendrils towards his face. He stepped even further backwards, and the stuff subsided, melting back into the layer over Maxil.

"Tegan. Turlough. What does that smell like to you?"

"I don't smell anything," said Turlough, and Tegan agreed. The air was flat and sterile, with maybe a faint hint of mushrooms.

The Doctor leaned forward, stretching his neck and keeping his hands at his sides, and breathed out with an audible whoosh. At the touch of his breath, the white thing boiled again.

"Interesting," the Doctor said, leaning back prudently. "Some sort of organic substance, highly reactive. It appears to be triggered by chemicals carried in the breath. Gallifreyan breath, to be specific. And it smells quite - intoxicating, actually. I wonder." He looked at Maxil, pinned and wrapped on the floor like a Christmas present that couldn't be trusted to remain under the tree. "This may be some sort of life support system, recycling his water."

"Recycling his-" and Tegan noted how the stuff coiled like threads into the corners of Maxil's mouth. Presumably those same threads could be all over him. Soaking up his sweat and - everything else; filtering it for re-use.

"But what is it for?" The Doctor frowned, pursing his lips.

"Emergency survival equipment?" Tegan could imagine bundling up airplane passengers in this stuff before a crash - or maybe even before, in some cases.

"Yes, but what's the emergency?"

At least part of the emergency was revealed as they went on: destroyed doors, long parallel scrapes on the immaculate gleaming stone floors. And people, lying here and there as though dropped, and all of them covered with the white organic sheets. Time Lords in elaborate heavy robes and rigid flaring collars; guards in red and white uniforms that barely showed through the rippling layers over them.

The Doctor stopped at the intersection of two corridors. "Now that way," he pointed, "is to the Council Chambers, and that way is to the Panopticon. So - which way?"

"Doctor, there's something down there," said Turlough, standing alert and tense. In the direction of the Panopticon there was a rushing noise, and a buzzing.

"Perhaps we should try the Panopticon first," said the Doctor, striding confidently in that direction. There was something about that buzzing sound that made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, but he didn't let it show. He strolled as though without a care in the world.

As they moved through the corridors, Tegan tried to decide what was familiar. The only other building she'd even seen on Gallifrey was the Tomb of Rassilon, and that had been a fortress. This was a fortress in disguise, she decided: stone with Art Deco slabs of gilded metal laid over it, and pretty lights and tamed flowers and little dancing fountains here and there. But the stone showed underneath, like a skull.


	2. Come Into My Parlour

In a garden on Gallifrey, the TARDIS mourned. She felt the fluttering touches of alien communications, but she ignored them. She had said all she had to say. She had done the necessary thing. Now she could see the consequences, of her actions and of the Doctor's actions, rolling through time like an avalanche of razors, slicing reality.

It was going to happen. It had happened. It would happen.

She mourned.

* * *

The Doctor and his companions finally reached the Panopticon, which looked like a particularly cold and pompous meeting hall; a large open space with serried rows of balconies high around it, and a metal-inlaid stone platform in the centre. The platform was occupied.

A figure in gold and white robes and the wide flaring gorget-crest of the Time Lords stood there, back towards the travellers, and the Doctor stepped forward a little indignant. He had told Flavia that she could act in his stead, but surely that didn't extend to wearing the robes of the President.

The figure turned, and before the Doctor even saw the face he knew that this was not a member of his species. No Time Lord ever born would turn and let their robes get so bunched up, dragging behind them as they moved; they had centuries' worth of practice in handling the multiple layers of clothing that were expected formal attire.

He didn't recognise the President. Well, he recognised the robes and the sash; but the face was not a Time Lord's face. Certainly not Flavia.

But despite that, it was a familiar face.

The man bore the most ancient trappings of Time Lord power as ornament - or perhaps trophies. He was twirling the metal-inlaid Rod of Rassilon between his palms like a toy. A familiar heavy gold sash hung in rectangular links over his shoulders and down his front. He had short dark hair with striking slashes of white through it, pale skin and dark eyes that met the Doctor's fearlessly, eyes full of power and force and not a little madness.

"Davros. You're dead," the Doctor breathed. He felt like his hair was standing straight on end, blown by the wind. He had been on Skaro when the Thals has struck: he could still smell the burning orchards, see the blazing pillar of fire that had been the Dalek city. He had been told by one of the survivors that everyone in the Kaled Bunker had perished.

"The Doctor was premature in reporting my death," said Davros; his voice unchanged. Still the harsh, arrogant tone of a man used to absolute command. The Doctor had heard that same tone when Davros was a withered cripple, kept alive and speaking only with machines. In his new body, the arrogance glowed through with fresh menace. Davros freed one hand and shook the heavy robes into place, flowing out around him.

The Doctor paused; if Davros didn't recognise his new face, it might be in his best interest to keep it that way - at least for a time.

"And you must be one of the pets, I assume?" Davros asked.

The Doctor opened his mouth a little, and then closed it.

"Pets?" said Tegan, her voice rising with indignation.

"Yes, non-native life forms. There's a savage woman who's running loose, an old paramour of the Doctor. But I will catch her. Soon."

"Leela was never my-" and the Doctor caught himself. So much for his intentions of remaining anonymous.

Davros seemed to tense with interest, his mobile mouth twitching in a satisfied smile.

"So you are the Doctor." His eyes raked over the blond man in front of him, as though comparing him to someone else. "Remarkable, this regenerative abilities of your species. I really must perform some experiments. Soon." His smile turned remarkably ugly without changing at all.

The Doctor decided to ignore this unsubtle threat, and skip past Davros' surprising survival and go straight for the matter of interest. "How did you get here, Davros? How could you possibly penetrate the barriers around this planet?"

"Well, it seems that there was a massive power drain recently. Something to do with one of your leaders misusing the time travel equipment - typical." That with a sneer. "And after the drain was stopped, your High Council formed a Committee to consider possible energy conservation strategies moving forward. And they printed out many official schedules, and ran up dozens of prototypes of official robes that committee members would wear, and held many, many meetings."

The scorn was thick in his voice now. "Your resources were barely enough to keep the lights on, never mind your defences. The deflection barrier was no match for me, especially after my Fleet transmitted your transponder signal. The Time Lords destroyed themselves; they opened their gates to me, and all is mine, from the Citadel to the Death Zone."

Turlough gasped. "The Death Zone. Oh, no. You aren't trying to enter the Tomb of Rassilon, are you?" he said, his eyes nearly starting from his head. "To gain immortality?"

The Doctor turned to silence his companion, and caught a sly look in Turlough's eye that turned his stomach. They both knew what would happen to any person who penetrated the Tomb of Rassilon and asked for immortality. Turlough was trying to trick Davros into suffering Borusa's fate.

"As it happens, I have already been there." Davros' eyes thinned and he looked at Turlough with something bitterer than amusement in his expression. "The Death Zone's defences were no match for a full Dalek force, not even that pretty dancing little robot. I know what is waiting there, in the Tomb of Rassilon, and that is not the immortality I seek."

"Who is this?" Turlough asked the Doctor. The Doctor's tone and manner suggested this man was very important, and Turlough preferred to know who was in charge here - especially if it wasn't the Doctor.

"That, Turlough, is Davros. The creator of the Daleks." The Doctor's sharp, short gesture indicated the man on the platform, as though he didn't want to draw his attention.

Turlough looked interested rather than afraid. "Really? The way they talk, you'd think they invented themselves-"

"Turlough, what a striking name. You always did have such interesting taste in companions, Doctor. And who is this young lady graced with the remarkably lovely-"

"Legs?" Tegan cut him off. Undoubtedly, she'd heard it all before.

"Arms, actually, I was going to say. I've always been an arms man." Davros' eyes seemed to drink in the sight of Tegan, her smooth white arms and dark red hair. She twitched, as though wishing she'd worn something over her short-sleeved top to keep off both strange eyes and cold drafts.

"Tegan Jovanka and Vislor Turlough are my companions and are under my protection," the Doctor said, his eyes suddenly blazing.

"Understood," said Davros flatly. "They will be just as safe as - you are." The two men exchanged a look of cold understanding.

"So, Davros. What bring you to Gallifrey?" The Doctor tried to keep his tone light. "Not exactly the cream of galactic tourist destinations. I should know."

"There were a number of places I wanted to visit once I left Skaro. Places the Reflectionists recommended as being of interest. For example Biblios - have you been there?"

"Of course. The library planet."

"Marvellous." Davros stared into space for a moment, his eyes wide with something that was almost awe. "An entire planet-sized library, and so beautifully indexed! I could have drowned myself forever in it, in its data banks and scrolls and endless, wonderful books. I was there to give them a copy of my autobiography, among other things-"

'"Autographed?" Tegan said snidely.

"But of course," Davros answered. "I was almost reluctant to have a purpose; how much better it seemed to just wander through those endless aisles, picking and reading…But I did have another goal besides posterity. There were certain writings of Rassilon, commentaries on his history that had been annotated in his own hand."

Davros held out his hand. "I held one book in my hand and thought, he held this book. He wrote these words…" He dropped the hand, and scowled. "And then that very annoying man showed up. He rather reminded me of you, Doctor, in manner if not in looks." His eyes pierced the blond man before him. "Wore black. Had a natty little beard. He claimed to be a Time Lord called-"

"The Master," Tegan and the Doctor breathed as one. Turlough felt a shiver creep down his spine, and he looked to make sure nobody was sneaking up behind them. He seemed to feel a cold breath on the back of his neck.

"Yes, in fact. He seemed rather interested in Rassilon's words as well, and we had the most violent argument about the book in question. By the end of it we were chasing each other up and down the reading tables, the Daleks screeching at us to stop, and the librarian robots threatening all of us with triple fines…Most unbecoming exertion for a man my age." He smoothed the back of his hand over his brow, ostentatiously; then had to shake his arm when he lowered it to make the sleeve hang correctly.

The Doctor snapped, "I don't suppose that you left the Daleks on Biblios, either." He was remembering those long parallel scrapes on the floors of the corridors. He should have recognised them: on how many battlefields, how many abattoirs, had he seen those same marks?

"This entire Citadel has been infiltrated, by my Daleks and also a rather cleverly tailored fungus that will support Gallifreyan life forms in deep sleep indefinitely. Oh, your people are quite safe, I assure you. For now."

"And they will remain safe for how long, I wonder?" the Doctor asked.

Davros shrugged - or maybe not; it was hard to tell under the shoulder-armouring collar. "You know."

"Tell me anyway. Enlighten me, Davros." There was steel in the Doctor's voice.

"Oh, I've certain you have guessed. Why I have travelled the years and the light-years to conquer your world." He smiled. "I am here for the Harvest."

That single word sent a shiver up all their spines; but while Davros seemed to shiver with delight, the three travellers felt something distinctly colder move over them.

Davros continued, his words rolling out like pounding waves. "That great ritual of combining and condensing soul-energy that will advance myself - and my Daleks - to the next level of existence, to the realm of the Gods. We shall become Eternals, beings of pure energy and pure power. It has been done many times, and the Reflectionists have given me all the data that is required.

"Of course, under normal circumstances Skaro itself would be our launch point and our fuel, combined. But these are not normal circumstances. I have decided that I do not need Kaled souls for the Harvest. Instead I will use - yours."

The Doctor flinched.

"Time Lord souls. The quality shall be the finest, I think - that is, if we are to judge by you. I am sure the energies will be sufficient." Davros' eyes gleamed with ruthless joy. "Many races enter that realm in spirit, but I shall enter it in flesh. Not only myself, but my Daleks and my Fleet. We shall meet the Eternals clothed and armed, stronger than any race has even been! And the fact that in the process I shall strike at you, the people who have done so much to interfere with me…well, that's just a delightful bonus."

"So," Turlough cleared his throat with almost a chuckling noise, "I'm sorry, but what you are saying is, you don't want to enter the realm of the Eternals unless you can bring your pants with you?" He smirked, and Tegan did as well.

Davros frowned. "Young man," he said, his every word edged in ice, "once you have gone a few decades without pants or anything to wear them on for that matter, you will think more highly of them."

"I've met the Eternals," said Tegan flippantly, and flinched at how Davros' eyes suddenly latched onto her. "I wasn't impressed," she continued. "Bunch of idlin' dilettantes, bored out of their minds. Can't imagine why anyone would want to join them."

"I appreciate the information, Tegan Jovanka," Davros said, making an abbreviated bow and then stopping when the bottom edge of his collar dug into his chest. "It sounds as though the natives will not be giving us any trouble then."

Tegan bit her lip. The Doctor knew that she had found the Eternals terrifying, for all her light tone: callous beings that would twist and manipulate people like dolls, without any care as to the results. But apparently even she wasn't certain that she wanted the Daleks loosed on them.

The Doctor was breathing a bit too fast, cheeks flushed as the full meaning of Davros' words sank in. "You can't just set up a Harvest here like a, like a factory!"

"Oh yes I can, Doctor." Davros paced forward a step and then stopped, his robes brushing behind him and his hair blowing around his head. "Our ships are aligning themselves now." He pointed upwards. "They prepare in orbit, even as we prepare here."

He looked pensive for a moment. "I wish you could have read those words of Rassilon's, Doctor. They would have given you a fresh perspective on the matter. He wrote about souls, you see. Their detection and their use. He even offered suggestions for how a Harvest could be conducted on this world. And according to him, I am missing one particular component for this ritual to be completed."

His eyes were like black embers burning in his face. "I require the Matrix, Doctor. The sum of all Time Lord knowledge, the repository for their memories and biodata, is to be placed under my control. And to access the Matrix, I require the President of Gallifrey."

Letting the Rod of Rassilon fall at his feet with a clatter, Davros reached under his robes and pulled out a heavy golden circlet set with domed gems. It seemed like a weapon in his grasp.

"It is time for you to fulfil the destiny your people have laid out for you, Doctor." Davros held out the Crown of Rassilon in his outstretched hands, like a gift. "Use the Crown. Send me on. Drive me and the Daleks out of the universe! Open the Matrix to me and mine, Lord President, and we will be gone for all eternity - or rather, into all eternity."

"Never." The Doctor's eyes burned as well, in fury. He pictured Gallifrey stripped and bare, like a burnt cornfield, nothing but ashes and earth. Davros rising from those ashes, a phoenix unbounded by any constraints, triumphant.

"I think you will. I think that I can - persuade you."

"And if you can't, you'll force me, I suppose."

"If that is how you wish it…" Davros tucked the Crown away, and make a subtle gesture with one freed hand.

A sudden breeze seemed to ruffle the Doctor's hair, and he looked up and gave a little cry, almost of pain.

Tegan looked up and thought of church bells. Great bell shapes were suddenly appearing out of nowhere, black-and-grey bells studded with half-spheres, hanging suspended in mid-air throughout the high open space of the Panopticon. The breaths of air that had been brushing by her suddenly made sense: these things had been above them, drifting back and forth. The bells had stalks poking out of them - then those stalks swivelled as one, fastening on her just as Davros' eyes had, and she realised that the bells were alive. And they could see her.

"Daleks," Turlough said, his voice more urgent than a shout. "Run!"

They ran. The Daleks settled to the stone floor behind them, a living metal wall around Davros that advanced to follow them. Their casings rang as they touched down, and Davros' laughter rang as well. The Daleks chanted as they moved in pursuit of their prey, a war chant that had frozen the hearts of billions.

"Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!"

* * *

Above Gallifrey, a signal was received. Ships began to arrange themselves, twining their orbits and paths around and between each other, circling a single invisible point that was directly over the Citadel and the Panopticon. Daleks and Kaleds prepared themselves, calibrating their sense, plotting trajectories, stretching their limbs, testing mirrors and filters and focusers. They double-checked their calculations, charged their accumulators, or put on their dancing shoes.

Harvest time was here.

* * *

"Where are we going?" Tegan panted, running hard.

"Back to the TARDIS!" the Doctor shouted, the words trailing behind him like a scarf in the wind. "We need to find - STOP!"

He stopped, rearing back on his heels, and his companions came to a panting halt as well. The corridor was blocked before them, top to bottom, with a great white pulsating blob. This must be the fungus that Davros had mentioned, the same stuff that immobilised the unconscious people they had seen.

"It can't see us, can it?" Turlough said uneasily, looking over his shoulder to see if the Daleks were still coming. They were not in sight, but the rasping voices were definitely moving towards them.

The fungus rippled and suddenly grew blue spots - spots that looked disturbingly like eyes. With the slow finality of an avalanche, it started to move.

The Doctor turned to run. Before he could finish his turn, he fell, and the fungus rolled forward to engulf them all.


	3. Spinning

"Nyder!" Davros snapped, carefully picking his way off the Panopticon platform. It was remarkably difficult to walk in these robes. They completely obscured his feet, and the collar meant he couldn't bend his neck far enough to see what he was doing.

"Here, sir," and Davros' Security Head stepped out from behind one of the invisibility shields. His pale face was as calm and serious as always, but his black uniform showed signs of being vigorously brushed, with traces of dust visible here and there; some of the fleeing Time Lords had hidden in disused spaces within the Citadel, too small for a Dalek to access, and Nyder had helped capture them. He holstered his blaster and waited for orders.

"Help me get these things off," Davros grumped, and Nyder's gloved hands flew to ease off the crest-and-collar, and unfasten the Sash and the robes. As the last of the invisibility shields were deactivated, more Daleks appeared and returned to their tasks. They were moving heavy equipment, novel machinery that was being coupled to the Time Lords' computers and energy systems. Slowly, step by step, wire by wire, they were infiltrating and suborning the alien technology and preparing it for their own use. They took the Rod and the Sash, putting them into metal sensor arrays that closed around them like carnivorous flowers.

"Like wearing a set of blankets and the mattress besides…So, what do you think?" Davros asked, shaking one last foot free of the robes. Underneath he was wearing his usual crisp white laboratory uniform.

In answer, Nyder carefully folded the robes over one arm and leaned over to pick up a tiny silver bead that was tapping urgently against his boot. He placed the bead into a shallow divot on one of the machines, and both he and Davros watched as data scrolled across the screens.

"Excellent," decided Davros finally. "The TARDIS is, if not under our complete control, certainly open to our suggestions. The Daleks are well deployed and ahead of schedule for the integration, and our secondary contact has moved into position."

"He will try to stop us." Nyder frowned and flicked another bit of dust from his sleeve. "He will fail," he said with finality. "As for his companions…the boy for me?"

Davros smiled thinly. "And the girl for me, yes. It should be easy enough to intercept them."

"And after I've caught the boy?" Nyder arched his brows behind his glasses.

"Explain his choices to him, and then deliver him to the TARDIS. I'll do the same. The Daleks can keep an eyestalk on them while we both - persuade - the Doctor. I'll be interested to see what the companions decide."

"They won't escape." Nyder's tone was definite. "Neither will the Doctor."

* * *

The Doctor was falling in darkness. The corridor floor had opened under his feet as the fungus wave rolled over him, and his flailing arms brushed the rough stone walls without finding any purchase.

He fell into a lift field - the bouncy feel was unmistakable - and into a smell: an eye-watering aroma that seared his nostrils like the chemical shouts of a thousand dying flowers. But if the intensity of that perfume was less, it would have been remarkably similar to the personal perfume of -

"Flavia!" the Doctor exclaimed with delight, as the lights came on and he rolled to his feet.

Flavia looked less than delighted. Grave and solemn as any Time Lady of rank, she looked every centimetre a Councilwoman. But the Doctor's sharp eyes caught a frayed look to the edges of her robes, and a certain tautness to her expression, that suggested she was not at her peak level of comfort. The gemmed metal band holding back her wavy grey hair was a bit askew.

"What is that smell?" the Doctor said, mopping at his streaming eyes with his sleeve and smearing the dust over his face into long streaks.

"It's the only thing we've found that can force the invaders' animals to withdraw, even temporarily." Around Flavia were several of the Citadel Guard, clutching heavy cut-glass perfume bottles topped with elaborate pink and purple stoppers that went oddly with their battle gear and unholstered blasters. The room they were all standing in was bare and cold and rather dusty.

"Not animals," the Doctor said. "A fungus."

"A fungus?" The word rolled contemptuously off Flavia's tongue. "Are you suggesting that the Time Lords have been invaded by, by a mushroom?"

"Yes, well it's a fungus from Skaro, which makes it a special case. Look, if you could just get me to a laboratory with some of that perfume, I can analyse-"

"That is not my concern right now." Flavia swept forward until her eyes were level with the Doctor's. "My concern is why the President of Gallifrey has betrayed his people and permitted the invasion of our planet. Again."

The Doctor swallowed. Then he grinned as he marshalled his arguments. He rather thought that he would be needing all of them.

* * *

Turlough was running. Sort of. Wherever he looked he saw fungus, in a great rolling white bubble around him. When he ran, the fungus retreated in front of him - and filled in behind him, unfortunately. He couldn't see where he was going, and kept crashing into walls or tripping down stairs at random. When he punched out at the fungus, or tried to force his way through, it shoved him away like a hostile pillow.

No matter how he shouted, all he heard was the sound of his own voice, and his panting breath. He didn't seem to be running out of air, at least. But he had no idea where the Doctor and Tegan had gone, and right now he didn't care. He just wanted to see where he was, find a way out of this.

He dazedly thought that the whole experience was rather like being trapped in a dessert. Something puffy and sticky that stuck to the mouth, like a marshmallow or a blancmange.

"Go away, go away!" he yelled one last time, and as though it had heard him the fungus seemed to deflate, pouring away from around him and vanishing. He quickly riffled his short red hair with his fingers, but didn't find any sticky bits left behind.

Turlough looked around the vast room that he seemed to have blundered into. It might be a museum, with black walls and carpet, and waist-high black plinths holding various little objects: statues, metal-crested skull caps, jewellery. Reflexively he started to evaluate which of these objects would conveniently fit into his pockets - and then dropped that line of thought, a little ashamed. There was something more important to worry about.

There was a man in the room with him. Not a Gallifreyan, he thought: the man was wearing a black uniform, not the red and white of the Citadel guards. He was on the far side of the room, his back was turned to Turlough, and he seemed totally absorbed in the little statue he was looking at while tapping at some sort of electronic touchpad.

Turlough looked behind him and then around him, but he couldn't see a door there. In fact the only door he could see was - on the other side of the man in black. Of course for all he knew he had walked in past this man; the invaders might be used to great blobs of this fungus rolling everywhere.

Turlough's eyes went to his left; there was a larger, rectangular plinth there, and atop it was some sort of metal tube, ornamented with little parallel rods of gold and silver over its surface. Silently, hoping there weren't any alarms, he reached out and picked it up by one end. The ornaments pressed coldly into his palms, but he could get a grip on it. Slowly, he moved towards the black-clad man.

He was almost close enough to bash the smaller man down and get past him to the door when some sound caused him to turn. At the sight of Turlough, he cringed.

"Don't hit me with that thing!" he shouted, eyes wide behind his glasses.

Turlough scowled as menacingly as he could manage, and gripped the club harder. "Oh? Why not?"

"You might break it!"

Turlough froze, and then shot a glance at the club in his hands. The golden ornaments were little carved figures of Time Lords, with silver inlaid hands and faces, each one in different robes and collars. And everyone one of the hundreds of tiny figures had a different face. Were they all supposed to be real people? He couldn't even begin to imagine how many hours of labour must be represented by this - whatever it was.

"Gold and platinum, plus other elements I can't even identify," said the man, staring at the club. "All hand-worked and hand-finished, I think." He blinked up at Turlough; despite his rather sinister-looking outfit, his manner reminded Turlough of a clerk, some minor functionary. "I've been doing an inventory," he added, holding up the pad as though it was a barrier before him. Angular characters scrolled up it, too quickly to read.

"Are you working for the Daleks?" said Turlough, still holding the club. The platinum explained why it was so heavy.

"Well, no, I mean yes, I came here with them. But I don't work for them," the man babbled. "Daleks only work for Daleks, don't you know. I received the order to make sure that everything here was recorded."

"Recorded? Why not just," Turlough hefted the club, "take what you want? I mean, you are in charge here."

"Me?" The man gave a nervous smile. "Oh no. I'm just following orders-"

"You lie," hissed a woman's voice out of nowhere. An arm came sliding over the man's shoulder to press a knife to his throat; the knife looked quite sharp.

Turlough squeaked and nearly dropped the club. He hadn't even heard the woman enter. She was tall, with brown hair worn loose over the shoulders of a dark robe that was simpler than the elaborate wear of the Time Ladies he had seen. Her blue eyes were narrow and suspicious.

"Who are you?" she demanded, scowling at Turlough over the shoulder of her prisoner - she was half a head taller than him, so it was easy. Her eyes went over his blue suit and striped tie, clearly not local garb. "How did you get here?"

"I came with the Doctor-" Turlough offered.

The woman's tanned face suddenly blazed with delight. "The Doctor's here? Quick, take me to him!"

"I don't know where he is," he quickly amended. "The fungus attacked us."

"Then we will have to find the Doctor and take him to Flavia; she has a magic that can free him," she stated rather than said.

"What about him?" Turlough said, pointing doubtfully at the man in black.

"I'm just following orders-" he whined.

"You are a liar and a serpent," the woman informed him coldly. Her free hand was quickly scurrying over her prisoner's clothes, removing weapons that had been concealed here and there. "I remember you, Security Commander. I should have known you were here, as soon as I saw your Liaison."

The captive straightened, ignoring the threat of the knife. His eyes suddenly were cold behind his glasses; he might be a prisoner, but there was nothing cowed about him. He shed his cringing manner as though it was an invisible skin.

"I remember you," he said simply. He moved only his eyes to look in her direction. "Leela."

* * *

Flavia strode back and forth in front of the Doctor, interrogating him.

"You told us that Skaro had been destroyed," she said again, turning on her heel.

"No, that's not right. I told you that I saw the Thals attack and destroy the Kaled Dome and the Dalek city. And I thought the Bunker was destroyed as well. But if Davros is here-"

"And the only other witness to this destruction was Miss Romanadvoratrelundar. Who is conveniently not available to testify."

The Doctor ground his teeth behind tight lips; it hadn't been his fault that Romana decided to stay behind in N-space.

"Flavia, are you suggesting that I entered into some alliance with Davros? And lied about his death?"

"The thought had occurred to me," she said imperiously. "The Daleks penetrated our defences using your transponder signal. You conveniently arrive after they are in control, claiming to have been dragged here by a vortex magnetron-"

"Well, you are wrong, Flavia! Completely wrong, totally wrong!" The Doctor breathed in and out, trying to calm himself and ignore the smell of dust and too-strong perfume. And another smell, not real but still strong in the air: defeat. "What could the Daleks possibly offer me to make me betray you?"

"They could have threatened your companions. For all we know Romanadvoratrelundar is their prisoner now."

"For all we know, Tegan and Turlough are their prisoners now!" He stared at the stone ceiling overhead; somewhere up there were the two people he'd dragged here. He'd never imagined that he was bringing them into so much danger.

Flavia glanced at one of the guards, who shrugged and said, "No sign of them on the security net." There was a jury-rigged computer access to one side of the room, which the guards had used to open the emergency fire shaft under the Doctor's feet earlier. A monitor forlornly scrolled on top of it, accessing fewer and fewer cameras as the Daleks burrowed deeper into the main systems. The guards looked exhausted, dark rings under their eyes. The Citadel's last defenders, nearly asleep on their feet.

"Flavia, I need to find them." The Doctor's voice was deadly serious. "I need to find out what's really happening here. What the Daleks' master plan is. And to find that out, I need to know what Davros found on Biblios."

He stared at Flavia, his eyes like chisels of ice, and for once she was silent.

* * *

"Hello?" shouted Tegan a little hopelessly.

When she had gotten out of the fungus, she had found herself in a great dark room, with dark stone blocks underfoot. The walls were too far away to see, and the overhead lights were tiny spots that reminded her of stars. She had no idea which way it was to the door, and the fungus had slithered away in a dozen directions at once, so that was no help.

The only thing that wasn't stone was a forcefield - she thought. It was an invisible wall at least; she could run her fingers just above it and feel it pushing back on them. Little glitters of light seem to sparkle when she touched it - not in front of her eyes, but somehow behind them. There was nothing on the other side of the forcefield except more stone floor.

With a lack of any other landmarks, she was walking along the forcefield, hoping that it led somewhere. The fungus must have brought her here through something like a door. The lights seemed to be glowing a little brighter along here, bright enough that she saw something white moving towards her.

"Hello," said Davros, striding towards her with a self-satisfied grin on his face. He had taken off the Time Lord robes and was wearing white clothes that looked like the uniform of a particularly futuristic mad scientist, which was appropriate for the creator of the Daleks, she supposed. He approached, dark eyes intent on her -and then stopped with a sharp bark of pain as he hit the forcefield. Against her best judgment Tegan had to laugh.

"What is this?" he asked. His eyes flickered too quickly, darting back and forth, seeking the source of the barrier between them. He raised both hands, fingers spread wide, feeling the forcefield.

"Beats me," Tegan replied frankly. "But so long as you're on the other side of it, I hope it holds out." With more than a hint of a smirk on her face, she walked away, parallel to the forcefield. He did not follow.

She walked through the darkness, the fingers of one hand tingling a bit as she ran it along the wall she could not see. She listened, but apparently Davros wasn't creeping after her. Then something white appeared ahead, and she stopped, thinking it might be more fungus. It wasn't. It was a man. A man in white clothes with black-and-white hair, standing off to one side on the other side of the forcefield, and staring away into the distance.

"How did you get ahead of me?" she asked.

He started, and then turned to stare at her. "I haven't moved."

They both looked around, but saw only the stone floor and the lights far overhead, and each other.


	4. Bound

Flavia was on the defensive suddenly. The Doctor's line of questioning seemed to have upset her, enough that the ragged guards were watching the Doctor more closely than was quite proper as he paced. His striped pants made a whisking noise as he walked and turned and walked and turned; Flavia stood still.

"There is nothing of Rassilon on Biblios," she declared, her voice ringing. "All that he created has been returned to his home world. The Sash, the Rod, the Crown…"

The Doctor let a hint of exasperation show on his features. "Yes, yes, I know, right down to the Coronet and the Harp and for all I know the Bookmark and the Slippers of Rassilon. But what did Davros find on Biblios, that he believed Rassilon had written?"

"Nothing," she said a little too quickly. "There may have been…some falsely attributed materials. But they have all been removed, all of them!"

"All translations?"

"What?" Flavia's eyes were suddenly wide.

The Doctor sighed. "Flavia…other races do not have the Time Lords' gift of speaking and reading all languages. They make separate copies of information, a new copy for each language. Did the Time Lords remove only the originals?"

"I…" Flavia looked stunned.

"And if Rassilon was on Biblios, what would he have hidden there? Something that he didn't dare leave here. Something to do with Gallifrey…"

"You question the wisdom of Rassilon?" Flavia snapped, drawing herself up straight.

"I'm questioning his intentions, not his wisdom," the Doctor thought aloud.

The sound of an opening door interrupted them.

"We have a prisoner!" said Leela, shoving a familiar black-clad man into the room in front of her.

"Doctor," said Turlough, following after them. "You're all right!"

The Doctor felt himself relax, tension he hadn't been fully aware of coming undone. "I'm fine, Turlough. Have you seen Tegan?"

"No, I haven't."

"Doctor?" Leela asked, with a little hitch in her voice. "We could not find you above…"

"Leela. How splendid to see you again," the Doctor said, smiling wider than he had since he arrived on this planet. He noticed with some amusement how she had taken the elaborate robes and overrobes of Gallifreyan women's wear and turned them into something practical: dark for hiding in shadows, with ample pockets and a slit at her side through which the sheath of her knife peeped out.

"You have changed," she said in reply, stepping forward and touching the edge of his jacket with curious fingers. Her other hand remained at her captive's throat, holding her knife just barely touching his skin. "All of you has changed." Her face was bright with interest as she looked at his new blond hair and blue eyes.

A small doglike robot in rolled in after Leela. "Master," he said, his metal head cocking upwards.

"K-9," the Doctor paused. It is difficult to read the body language of a robot, but he thought he detected a certain jaunty angle to K-9's corrugated neck. The energy gun barrel embedded in his muzzle was scorched as though from heavy use. "I see you've protected your Mistress," he said lightly.

"Affirmative, Master," K-9 almost purred.

The Doctor's eyes raked over the guards; none of them looked familiar. But Leela was here, and K-9, so-

"Is Andred here?" he asked, and saw Leela tense, tendons standing tight in her neck for an instant.

"He was on duty when the invaders landed," she said, her voice tight. "He fell down a flight of stairs and broke his leg. Before I could splint it, the fungus was on him." She shot a bitter look at the perfume bottles that the guards held so protectively; bottles less than half-full. "It would not be - logical - to waste the potion to free him, when he cannot walk or fight. A warrior who cannot fight must be left behind."

K-9 swivelled his head sharply, looking at the man still standing placid under the threat of Leela's knife. He was the centre of attention; Flavia and the guards were staring as well.

"Nyder," the Doctor said, his attention focussed totally on Leela's prisoner. "Of course. Where there's smoke there's fire, and where there's Davros there's Nyder." He gave a little smile. "It even rhymes."

He examined Nyder openly: his cheekbones and jaw might be a little sharper, but the years had apparently touched him as lightly as they had Davros. His brown hair was still perfectly combed, and he bore himself with the alert posture of a soldier - or an assassin. His uniform had changed: it was more sleekly cut and had the metal attachments for spacegear studded over it, but it was still black. An abstract eye was patterned over one side of his chest - Davros' mark.

"This is one of the invaders?" Flavia said, sweeping forward.

"Security Commander Nyder-"

"Security Head," Nyder corrected.

"Whatever his title, he's still Davros' second in command, unless I miss my guess. And Davros led the Daleks here."

"We could not have done it without the Doctor's help," Nyder added.

"You lie." Leela's whisper was more threatening than any scream. She had moved a little aside to let the Doctor speak to Nyder, but her knife was still poised to strike.

Nyder smiled softly. "He aided us quite willingly," he said, looking at the Doctor as though he was an old friend - which was far from being true. "He wanted to transform Gallifrey, and he needed the Daleks to do that. He wanted to rule without having to endure the hidebound machinations of your corrupt High Council-"

Flavia inhaled sharply, and Nyder somehow managed to deduce her position from her outraged expression.

"-present company excluded," he finished smoothly.

"You've searched him for weapons?" the Doctor asked Leela.

"Here," and she started to bring a stream of metal things out of her robe. Blasters, knives, lockpicks, and other unidentifiable items. Most of them the Doctor examined and then either handed back to her or dropped them to the floor (Turlough eyed the dropped items but didn't spot anything he wanted for himself). But the last item made the Doctor pause.

"And what's this, I wonder?" he said, holding a small silvery bottle in front of Nyder's face between two fingers.

"Hair spray," he replied flatly.

"Hair spray?" The Doctor leaned forward, turning his head as though to capture those dubious words more carefully in his ear.

Nyder blinked up at him, the picture of innocence. He was still shorter than the Doctor. "It is the duty of a soldier to appear neat and professional at all times," he murmured.

Turlough felt a touch of admiration for this superb dissembling, but the Doctor's expression suggested that he felt rather bilious. Instead of answering, he picked up a large glass vase containing a writhing blob of fungus. A scout of some sort apparently; the guards had been capturing these little blobs in whatever containers they could, cautiously, without touching them.

With careful aim, the Doctor squeezed the bottle and sent a thin jet of mist directly into his own face. He coughed, reversed the bottle, and tried again. This time he sprayed the fungus sample, which promptly contracted into a round little sphere the size of a marble. He shook the vase, and the ball clattered against the inside like a seashell.

"Of course," the Doctor said. "The fungus goes into a sort of dormancy, encapsulating itself."

"And will it release the people it contains first?" Flavia asked, her eyes keen on the vase.

"Probably," the Doctor guessed.

"No," said Nyder flatly. "They'll be killed. Murdered - by you, not by us."

"Now I wonder if that is the truth." The Doctor stepped close and stared deep into Nyder's eyes. Those eyes stared back, fearless.

"I could make him tell you, Doctor," Leela said, her voice as delicately sharp as the blade tickling behind Nyder's ear. "Let me put him to the torture. He will talk."

"That won't be necessary, Leela. I have this." The Doctor held up the spray bottle. "Give me a few hours and I'll synthesise more; release it into the Citadel ventilation system and wake up all your prisoners. Difficult to perform your Harvest when the crop is fighting back, yes?"

Before Nyder could reply, there was a muffled thudding noise overhead, and they all looked up. The square stone hatch set into the middle of the ceiling had a fine drift of dust coming from around its edges.

"The fungus must have crawled down the shaft after me," the Doctor said, prudently backing away from the centre of the room.

They were all staring upwards, mesmerised by the soft fumbling sounds. Without taking his eyes from the ceiling, Nyder whistled, a short sharp sound that pierced the ear like a needle.

K-9's head came up, and his sensor-eyes gleamed brighter for a moment.

"Open!" he ordered sharply, and K-9 obeyed. A line of red light shot from his muzzle. The hatch sprang open, and the fungus came pouring down, like living liquid that grasped at the Gallifreyans with flowing fingers.

They all shouted; the Doctor quickly started spraying the fungus repellent around him. The white mass flinched away from him, clotting into clusters of spheres the size of cricket balls and then rolling underfoot. The spheres clattered together like pebbles in the tide - or chattering teeth.

It was not enough. He did not have enough spray to stop all the fungus. He could see Flavia and the guards collapsing, the fungus winding around them, pulling them down and closing over their heads.

"Stun!" shouted Nyder behind him, and he spun to see K-9 shoot Leela. She fell, her falling knife blade winking before the fungus covered it and her. Turlough was standing on one foot and desperately kicking with the other, his mouth half-open in horror; the fungus rolled back from his blows.

"She'll suffocate!" the Doctor shouted. He sprayed around him again, desperately trying to part the writhing sea around him and get to Leela. Waves of the stuff lapped in a circle around him, knee-high and then waist-high along the walls, swallowing the computer equipment. Hardened spheres of fungus rolled around his ankles; if he tripped now and fell, the fungus would pull him under.

"She isn't native. It won't touch her," Nyder said, reaching out and dragging Turlough to his side. He smiled as he stepped back, putting each foot down with careful precision. The fungus poured away from his feet like ocean waves in reverse. He reached the door and vanished, with the clearly terrified Turlough in his grip.

"K-9!" The Doctor looked around, but the fungus was too thick, and he didn't know what K-9 would do if he found him anyway. He shook the bottle in his hand; there could not be much liquid remaining, and he needed enough to analyse. He paused for one anguished moment before he turned and laid down great sweeping sprays of the repellent, sliding his feet along the floor to keep from tripping as he made his way to the opposite door, and out.

Behind him the fungus churned, and then congealed into white clots scattered across the floor. It revealed the Citadel guards, sprawled limp and unconscious. Flavia lay on her back, her hands folded somewhat indignantly across her chest. Thick layers of fungus covered all their bodies, coating them like icing. Over each of their faces, a bubble of fungus started to form, ready to capture the moisture of their breath and recycle it.

Leela was revealed as well, lying on her side, eyes closed and fists clenched. K-9 was beside her, scanning her, his mechanical ears twitching like tiny radar dishes. When he was satisfied that she was all right, he sent a communication asking for further orders.

The Daleks answered.

K-9 spun round. The door opened at his signal, and he followed after the Doctor.

* * *

The Daleks were watching through K-9's sensors, even as they watched through each others' senses, and were in communication with the Citadel computers and the fleet of saucers in orbit. They could see the great patterns being drawn through space and time by their actions. To them the stumbling of Turlough's feet and the verbal duelling of Tegan and Davros was as important as the arrangement of the sleeping Time Lords in their Citadel, or the folding of the transduction barrier into a precisely geometric array. Everything was connected, everything had a purpose, and that purpose was approaching like an unstoppable wave of fire.

That burning would be all they had ever desired.

* * *

Davros was pacing back and forth in the underground darkness, running his hands over the forcefield; his palms vibrated as he pressed them to the shield and they were shoved away. Tegan stood on her side, a sour expression on her face and her arms crossed. She and Davros had been casting along this barrier, but neither of them could seem to find the way out. No matter how far they went along it, they always ended up face to face; and they hadn't found the walls of the room.

"I wonder," he mused. He took something that looked like a lipstick pencil from his pocket and tried to mark the forcefield, but with no effect.

"What are you on about?" she said, curious.

"I have a theory I'm going to test. I hypothesise that if I run away," he turned his back to her and pointed into the darkness, only turning his head to add, "straight away from this point, a contained inversion effect should transport me to the opposite side of the forcefield. And then I'll be over there…with you."

He winked, and dashed into the darkness. Tegan bit her tongue for a moment, and then turned and ran as well, away from the forcefield, away from Davros - that is, unless he was right and she was running straight into his arms. She ran suspended in blackness: the opposite of the fungus' white bubble. The touch of her feet on the ground and the feel of the air moving against her skin were the only real things. Everything else seemed to be gone. Her footsteps didn't echo.

She tried to imagine what it would like if she never stopped running. Running in the dark, blind and deaf in the darkness - at least Davros had been a face to see, a voice to hear, even if the man never seemed to shut up…

Something white rushed towards her face. She cried out and raised her hands to stop herself - and felt them bounce back, a fraction away from Davros' hands and the delighted sound of his laugh.

"See?" he said, smiling.

"See what?"

"Look down."

She did. She crouched; by reflex she twisted her knees to one side to keep her skirt decent. She picked up a small white button, covered with cloth. And when she looked up at Davros, he flipped aside the bottom hem of his tunic with an almost impish expression, and showed her where the last snap was missing.


	5. Tug of War

The Doctor had walked and run and solemnly marched and even, most irreverently, skipped through every corridor and room in the Citadel at some time or another. Right now, however, he was interested in only one of its architectural features.

Stairs.

He went higher and higher in the Citadel, using stone and steel and cast synthivory stairs; narrow stairs, broad stairs, fantastically carved and decorated stairs, and long-forgotten, very dusty stairs. Many times - too many times - he had to press himself against the wall and spray a few precious droplets of fungus repellent around his feet, as a great wide undulating stream of the alien goo came ambling up or down. Ambling was the correct word: if fungus could strut, this is how it would strut.

The fungus had a point, he supposed. To the best of his knowledge, he was the last conscious Gallifreyan in this city.

He kept moving up the stairs, trying to escape his pursuer. No matter how many stairs he climbed, though, the faint metallic voice behind him kept pace. The Doctor was sweating with exertion, and his calves felt like they had been beaten with hammers. How was K-9 managing these steps?

"You should return to the Panopticon, Master," K-9 tinny voice came from the distance, echoing upwards. "You are needed there."

The Doctor stopped on the next landing, panting for breath and mopping the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. He was fairly certain that he was moving sideways as well as up, towards the outer walls; soon he would have to choose whether to go outside, or try and double back. "Why are you still calling me Master?" he shouted down the stairs.

K-9's voice was no closer when he answered. "You are the Master, and I obey."

"You're obeying the Daleks," the Doctor said, as he pushed off from the wall and stepped rather than ran up the next flight of stairs. "You're helping them destroy us all, why?"

"The Daleks will not destroy Gallifrey."

The Doctor went up one more flight, thinking. The double hammering of his heartbeats in his ears was too loud, somehow; and then he realised it was not his hearts. It was a series of sounds coming from the Citadel audio system. It could almost have been music.

What were the invaders up to now?

* * *

The Daleks made music; with their machines and with their minds. High above, in the saucers, Kaleds made music as well, with the bending of forcescreens and the shrilling of circuitry, horns and drums and hands on bare flesh and feet on steel floors; and that music was refined and distilled and turned into a solid twining ribbon of sound that wound through the Citadel.

The Doctor could not see the effect the music was having. All through the Citadel, the fungus was boiling, moving fleshy pseudopods to the alien rhythms. And the fungus churned, and poured together, and started to arrange the people that it held in its grasp.

Maxil did not wake as the fungus pulled him flat to the floor and moved his arms and legs, bending them to specific angles. Nor did Flavia, or the Citadel guards, or any of the others. The bodies of the Time Lords were arrayed with precision, head to head or side by side, in clusters and stars and lines and spirals, in great shapes that undulated through the halls and rooms of the Citadel. If the whole Citadel could be viewed from orbit (where the Daleks were in fact viewing) and the viewers could somehow penetrate matter with their gazes, look past flesh and bone to see only soul and spirit (which the Daleks could also do), they would see all the living energies of the Time Lord race written into a series of great overlapping patterns like runes.

The Time Lords burned in their sleep, burned with soul fire. The Daleks watched, and judged, and waited.

* * *

The Panopticon was full of music. Beats almost too slow to be understood as rhythm, mingled with sudden notes of deep intensity or piercing shrillness. The Daleks were here, swarming around the equipment they had linked into the Time Lord's computer systems, and in the great empty stone space overhead, a few Daleks floated in a formation that was not quite random. They seemed to be drawing little paths through the air, moving in arcs and circles.

Nyder and Turlough were watching. Nyder stood at ease, gloved hands clasped behind his back, and Turlough was standing beside and a little behind him, hunched over. It was a part of himself he had always disliked, the irresistible urge to join with the strongest power available, to bow his head to the strongest fist. Despite all that the Doctor had taught him, all that he had learned, he still cringed at Nyder's heel.

"What are they doing?" he asked uneasily.

"Preparing for the Harvest," Nyder said, his words hissing out with a note of delight. "We all have our part to play in it." He turned and his brown eyes burned into Turlough's blue ones. "Even you."

Turlough tugged at his tie and sidled away, and then back when one of the Daleks ground past him. Suddenly he stiffened, and spat out too quickly, "I won't kill him."

"Kill whom?" Nyder inquired, not flinching as Turlough came a step closer; they were of a height and looked levelly into each other's eyes. Nyder's eyes were deadly calm; Turlough's were furious.

"I will not kill the Doctor," Turlough insisted. Irony of ironies, that someone else would ask him to act as an assassin. He imagined the Doctor tied to some altar, himself with the knife over him - no. Never.

"But you could kill him." Nyder gave the tiniest of smiles. "I know. A killer knows a killer." Their eyes held each others' with terrible recognition.

"You're wrong," Turlough insisted. "You're wrong and I know you're wrong." Then he looked around again, at the swarming Daleks. "You don't need me. You have the Citadel completely under your control."

"For the moment, yes. But once we raise ourselves to the plane of the Eternals, we will no longer be able to interact with the world of matter. We will have to learn that talent, like an infant learning to walk. So when we are gone, there will be nobody to help the Doctor escape his people's revenge except - you."

Turlough's ginger brows were a solid bar across his forehead as he scowled. He finally ventured, "I thought you were here to harvest - soul energy?" He had reasoned that this Harvest would be fatal to the Time Lords, but maybe he was wrong.

"You can live without a soul." Nyder looked innocently at his captive, a faint smile on his thin lips. "Davros managed it for decades, until the Reflectionists healed him."

"Reflectionists." Turlough gave a little laugh in the back of his throat. "Reflectionists aren't real, you know."

Nyder arched one well-groomed brow. "What makes you say that?"

"Well, come on!" Turlough's words were bold, but faltered a bit in the face of Nyder's impassivity. "They're just a story that children tell to frighten each other. You know, look into your reflection at midnight and it will come alive: become another person who knows everything in the universe...but if you aren't careful," his eyes widened and he went on more slowly, "it will step out of the mirror and take your place. And force you onto the other side - forever." He looked at the other man, wide-eyed.

Nyder smiled narrowly. "An old story, I presume?"

"Well, I guess so. As old as - as old as mirrors." Turlough tried to remember where he had heard about that story first. Wasn't there a very old play on Trion that mentioned the Reflectionists?

"The Reflectionists are as real as the Daleks. A race that travels through space as energy patterns, reborn in alien flesh only to move on. They came to Skaro, to undo the damage that the Doctor led onto our unsuspecting heads. Now we are here to repay the Doctor's masters for their harsh attention. To - reflect it back on them, shall we say."

Nyder's eyes narrowed. "It is the Time Lords who are to blame; the Doctor is only their tool. Our punishment of them will be - unique. The Doctor will consent to his part in the Harvest; Davros is certain of it. And afterwards, you will pilot the TARDIS and the Doctor away from this planet." He paused. "You can pilot the TARDIS, of course?" He said the question much too casually.

"I - maybe," Turlough hedged. He could only imagine what the Daleks would do if they had control of a time machine; he was not at all certain that Nyder was telling the truth. But if he could find out enough about the invaders' plans, maybe he could find a way to sabotage them. Find the Doctor again. "I can try."

"Excellent." Nyder tilted his head a bit to one side, studying Turlough's face in a manner not quite impersonal. "You do not seem to be questioning the right of Davros and the Daleks to do this. I thought the Doctor and his companions were always going on about rights and dignities."

"I try not to argue with people who have squadrons of Daleks at their beck and call, thank you." Turlough's words were clipped with sarcasm.

Nyder's eyes flickered to the circling war machines overhead. "A good point."

* * *

The Doctor huddled in a narrow stone niche, and waited.

The stairwell he had just jogged up had apparently not been planned as perfectly as it could have been; it did not align neatly with the ornamented but quite functional door that led out onto the Second Wall. There was a narrow space to one side of the doorway, just large enough for one man to hide in.

From the top of that Wall, a man could descend a dizzying series of stepped stone descents to Gallifreyan soil. When the Doctor had looked down through the open door before choosing his hiding place, he had seen those stairs, shrinking in the distance into a slanting line of tiny chisel-marks.

He could feel something inside of him urging him to take those steps. To run, run and keep running. But now that was quite impossible. There was no time: not with the beat of the music subtly accelerating, almost certainly signalling the approach of the Harvest.

His hands were dusty; his striped pants and loose jacket were dustier. The dust was not enough to keep him from taking a firm grip on the ornamental bar that had previously held the doors closed. It was heavier than he liked, but almost exactly the width of a cricket bat.

There was a faint humming from the stairwell to his right; he pressed his back to the stone and breathed slowly and deeply, trying to slow his thundering heartbeats. He closed his eyes for a second, thinking.

K-9 could not climb steps. But that was the sound of him, coming up after him. So the Daleks must have modified him, given him the ability to climb. Probably a levipropulsion unit of some sort. A small one, small enough to be clamped or added to K-9's body without being immediately obvious; otherwise Leela would have noticed it.

The question was, was the unit powerful enough for K-9 to fly - or merely float?

He rather though he was about to find out the answer. He tightened his fingers on his impromptu weapon, and waited.

K-9's voice was shockingly loud when he finally spoke; he must be close, very close. "I am obeying your orders, Master. You must save Gallifrey. The Harvest must occur."

The Doctor felt a sting as sharp as any insect's bite at those words. All up these stairs he had been picking at K-9's programming, shouting back orders and commands, trying to find out how he had been conditioned to attack the people he was meant to defend - even Leela. But the programming must be too strong. It must have been when the Daleks captured K-9, back on Skaro, so long ago. They must have tampered with him, and then waited with Dalek patience for the time to be right.

A shadow moved on the floor, cast in the dust of his footprints by the crystal overhead light, and the Doctor switched his grip from high to low, stepped out, and swung.

K-9 was floating a hand span above the stone floor, his eyes glowing red and his blaster out. The Doctor's blow took him squarely across his angular backside, scooping him up, up and out and through the door and far out into space.

The Doctor dropped the bar with a clatter and rushed to see. K-9's little blue metal form was flying - flying - closer to the ground - closer to the rocks - and then he landed, square on his base. A little puff of dust came out, tiny in the distance. And without a pause, K-9 started to move, gliding back over the rough ground back towards the city.

The Doctor exhaled in real relief. His little friend was unharmed. But it would take K-9 time to navigate the crumpled pathless ground on this side of the Citadel, and the thick stone walls would keep him from contacting the Daleks - he hoped.

Now to find the laboratories. His hand clenching the fungus repellent bottle as though it was an anchor, he turned and started trotting down the stairs, back into the Citadel, as fast and as quietly as he could.

* * *

"And then there was Wrack," Tegan continued; pacing back and forth in her side of the barrier. She was telling Davros about her encounter with the Eternals, hoping against hope that it would be enough to get him to stop his insane plan to join them. Her voice was the only sound in the vast dark space that held them. "Captain Wrack, she called herself. All she wanted was the power to treat every living thing, every Ephemeral as she called them, called us, as a toy. Toys that she could torture and break as she pleased."

Davros didn't look repulsed by this description; instead he looked interested. "Was she beautiful?" he asked.

Tegan paused, and bit her lip. "Yes," she finally allowed. "Beautiful like some poisoned flower. Something all bright colours, but one whiff of its scent and you're done for."

Davros frowned, staring down at the stone floor between his feet. Tegan felt a moment of hope; maybe she was getting through to him.

"Do you know," he said, "I think I've figured out what this energy field is designed for."

"Oh? What?"

"Sex."

Tegan just looked at him. "You have got to be putting me on," she said, crossing her arms and not caring the way that Davros' eyes followed that motion.

"I mean in the biological sense: a courtship ritual. The Time Lords have rather - strange - reproductive habits, at least if what I've extracted so far from the Matrix is correct."

Tegan considered, and then her curiosity got the better of her. "How strange?"

"I assume that you and the Doctor have never…?" Davros let his voice trail off in inquiry.

Tegan's dismissing look answered for her.

"Well. Let me just state for the record that for Gallifreyans, reproduction is more of a chore than a pleasure. For example, do you know what the Looms are?"

"No…"

"Good, then I won't tell you." Davros raised one slim finger, and spoke in a lecturing tone. "If my theories about courtship patterns in stagnant species are correct, and they almost certainly are, this is an inverter field, programmed to keep two people in proximity until some signal is sent. Tedious, transparent and immensely wasteful of power - it seems just the Time Lords' style."

"And this inverter field was triggered when we walked into it? Even though we aren't from this planet?"

"Well, the system is clearly far from perfect. After all," he said, "I didn't design it."

She nearly choked on her laughter, but managed to pull herself together enough to ask, "So it holds us here until we - what? Kiss and make up?"

He leaned close to the forcefield, then jerked his face backwards when it shivered against his skin. "If only it were that easy…Probably until some mutual emotional reaction is reached, signalling that this is - or rather, we are - a viable pair." He cocked his head. "I could tell you a joke. If I made you laugh, that might do it. Have you heard the one about the three Mutos and the contaminated food packets?"

"No, I haven't," Tegan cut him off. "And if we don't manage to send the correct signal?"

"Well, under normal circumstances I would think that the prospective couple would eventually give up, and someone outside the inverter field would turn it off. Of course," he looked glum for a moment, "at this point in time there's nobody outside the field who knows how to turn it off. We're at no risk of being trapped here indefinitely; eventually the Daleks will rescue me. But it would rather throw off my schedule." He hummed as though frustrated.

* * *

The TARDIS heard the music, and the voices, and the footsteps. It heard and saw and felt all things: the dreams of the sleeping Time Lords, the frustration of K-9 as he trundled back to the Citadel, the nervousness of Turlough, the deep unshakable certainty of Davros. And overhead, the great spinning pattern being created by the passages of the invaders' fleet, as they hovered and circled and danced.

The TARDIS could see what was coming. Great changes were boiling through Time itself like comets of pure energy drawing streaks of transformed reality behind them, scratching down the blackboard of eternity with an indescribable noise. The noise of the lives of a billion billion sentient creatures, changed forever.

The life of one man, one Time Lord, about to change.


	6. Enticement

Turlough was quick to discover that with a little encouragement, his captor was perfectly happy to expound on the Daleks' plans.

"The Doctor will be at the centre," Nyder said; he was standing on the slanted circular platform in the centre of the Panopticon, arms opened wide and eyes staring upwards. His body was taut under his uniform, a black slash against the chrome and stone. "He is the President; he will open the Matrix to us, and all its energies will be at our command. Above us the Fleet, its computers and engines and crew, will calculate the focus…"

Turlough's expression suggested that he thought this all quite interesting. He had learned that the equipment here was necessary for the completion of this 'Harvest'. But in reality, he was more interested that the room was relatively free of Daleks at the moment, and he had a clear path to the door. He took this opportunity to step back towards that door.

His legs didn't move, and he stared down at them in shock. He felt perfectly normal. He just couldn't walk.

"There is no use trying to escape," Nyder informed him. "I can override your nervous system easily, you know. Paralyse your legs."

"Oh," said Turlough, still staring down. He thought Leela had taken all of Nyder's weapons, but apparently not.

"Or your heart."

Turlough's head snapped up at this threat. Nyder slowly paced to the edge of the platform, and then walked down the steps, his eyes locked on Turlough's frightened face.

"I can do that," Nyder continued, his voice low with menace. "I allowed myself to be captured along with you, to find where Flavia was hiding. I was never a prisoner: I could have killed every Time Lord in that chamber, if it pleased me to. And Leela as well, and she certainly would have earned it. Do you know she stabbed Esselle? She's back in orbit, undergoing emergency tissue regeneration."

"Who is Esselle?"

"Security Liaison Esselle is my wife." Nyder emphasised that last word, just enough.

"But you'll get your revenge on Leela during the Harvest. Won't you," Turlough said cynically.

"Not in the way you are thinking." His tone was richly self-satisfied. "I find it more - satisfying - to know that I could destroy them all, but will instead use the minimum force to extract the maximum utility from them. And if the Doctor knew what we knew, I assure you, he would be here right now, helping us."

Turlough did not look convinced, for obvious reasons. Nyder stepped closer and went as though to take his arm, then his hand detoured and touched the bright school tie knotted at Turlough's throat.

"What does this represent?" he said, tugging at the cloth. "You seem to always be clutching at it. A weapon?"

"No, it's an ornament. It shows what school I attended, back on Earth," Turlough replied, not quite daring to raise his hand and brush Nyder's away. He might not be allowed to.

Nyder let the tie slide back through his fingers to fall against Turlough's chest. Their eyes met again.

"Is there anything else you'd like to see, before I take you to the TARDIS?" Nyder asked softly.

"You're letting me go?"

"Putting you in your place, rather. You will be safer at a distance from the Panopticon. And your own safety is paramount, is it not?"

Turlough flushed, ashamed at how easily the alien man had read him.

* * *

Tegan sighed in exasperation. She and Davros had been trying to come up with a joke between them, but had not had any luck. She had found the story of the three Mutos completely revolting; and Tegan's attempt to tell the one about the four nuns and the slipper was defused by Davros needing every term explained to him.

"I don't think we're making that emotional connection," she fretted.

"I could try taking off my clothes again-"

"No!" Tegan raised her hands in exasperation. "For someone who's so fond of his pants, you're certainly eager to get out of them, aren't you?"

Davros' brows rumpled. "Fond of my pants?"

"Yeah, you said to Turlough about not having them."

"Oh. That." Davros suddenly looked deathly serious.

"Am - is it private?"

"No." Davros put his hands behind his back, and his dark eyes stared at her and past her as well, looking at something very far away. Something terrible, judging by his expression. "On Skaro I was a military scientist, because you were either a military scientist or no sort of scientist at all. My laboratory was an obvious target for the enemy."

He touched his tongue to his upper lip. "They used atomic shells. Multiple megatons. The destruction was catastrophic. In the entire laboratory, the entire facility, I was the only survivor."

He raised his right hand and let it drift over the side of his face as he continued speaking. "The Kaled medical specialists saved - my brain, of course. My head, if not my sight or my hearing or my voice - I had to have mechanical implants to sense and to communicate again. They saved my torso. And - one arm. This arm."

He reached out and placed his palm flat on the forcefield between them. "This arm. And that was all." A gesture seemed to slice him off at the waist. "So I had no pants, and nothing to wear them on. Only machines kept me alive. And I was like that for years. Decades. It could have been centuries, or longer. I know. I had helped design my own life support equipment; it could have kept me functioning for a very, very long time."

Tegan swallowed, trying to keep the horror she felt off her face. "And then what happened? Was it the Doctor?"

"The Doctor? No. The Reflectionists - happened. A different alien race. They ended the war. Gave me this new body. They were, they are, the saviours of my planet. And they showed me the ways of the Harvest."

Her ears perked at that word. The Doctor had seemed to think the Harvest was very important. Maybe she could find out something that could help him. "Tell me about the Harvest," she asked. "About what you want the Matrix for."

"What do you know about the Matrix?" Davros asked, his look suggesting that he did not find Tegan's question as transparent as she had hoped.

"I didn't see much of it when I was in it," she said a little too lightly.

"You were in the Matrix?" Davros leaned forward until his forehead brushed the barrier; his dark hair crackled with static. "That's very interesting."

Tegan scowled. "Why?"

"Because on Biblios, I found Rassilon's blueprints for Gallifrey. His real plans for its creation, not the edited ones he left here for his descendants to see. How he would create the Eye of Harmony, to confine and control the energies needed for a time-faring species."

"Him and Omega," Tegan added bluntly.

"You know about Omega?"

"We've met."

Davros sucked air in through his teeth, impressed. "According to the Matrix, he was converted to antimatter and trapped in another dimension."

"Well, he wanted to leave. He tried to build himself a new body." The Doctor's body, for that matter, but Tegan didn't want to get into that. "It didn't work. It - rotted, while he was still alive. The Doctor sent him back."

"Really." Davros blinked, his eyes darting back and forth as he assimilated this new information. Then with an almost visible hitch, he came back to the present.

"Anyway - Biblios, Rassilon, the Matrix. Rassilon created the core of the Matrix, but he knew that for what he wanted it to be - a repository for all information, a collection of all Time Lord memories - it would need to be powered by something even more powerful than the Eye."

"And what's that?"

"Souls."

Tegan's voice was faint as she echoed back, "Souls?"

"The souls of the Time Lords are trapped in the Matrix. The dead of Gallifrey do not pass on to that next dimension where they are meant to go: instead they are held in this one, endlessly feeding their own memories back into the Matrix, reinforcing it. And the living Time Lords each have a part of their own soul bound inside, so that when they die, whenever and wherever, it will draw the rest of them back into the Matrix forever."

"That's horrible!" She imagined the Doctor being caged in there, in the endless streams of data, with the cold and callous Time Lords turning his mind inside-out for their reference. "I thought Rassilon was a hero to the Time Lords."

"He is remembered that way. However, my projections suggest that he committed any number of dubious experiments in the past, while he was planning and creating his home world and altering his species to what he thought they should be."

He cocked his head. "A man after my own heart, really. But if you have been in the Matrix, Tegan Jovanka, then there is a part of you there as well. A chain waiting to pull you in, so that your memories can be scrolled through for the rest of eternity-"

"No." Tegan's eyes showed white all around the edges. "No, I won't. I can't. They can't make me; they can't do that to me! It's not fair!"

"It's not fair," agreed Davros, stepping forward and taking her hands. "That's why I want your help to free - oh."

They stared down at their joined hands, then up at each other. The lights came on and revealed that they were in a small bare stone room, very small, with an open door visible behind each of them. The barrier was gone. It must have happened when they both agreed, together as one, that it was not fair.

"You were saying?" she finally prompted, faintly unwilling to take her hands away from his. Because they were warm and real, the way no hand had been warm or real since she came here.

Davros smiled, his dark eyes flashing. "I was saying that the Harvest will free them. And that part of you that is there - that will be free as well." He took in her uncertain expression. "You don't have to decide right away. Let me take you to the TARDIS, and you can rejoin your friend Turlough."

* * *

A Time Lord saves time.

He (or she) knows that once a time is visited, it cannot be visited again. So there are special events of note, great artistic triumphs or spectacular disasters, which a Time Lord will save, saying 'Someday I will go, there and then.'

This time, the time when the power of Gallifrey was at its lowest, was known to someone.

The Master was old, old in his borrowed body. He had used it hard. His short beard was white, and his thinning hair as well; his face was seamed with wrinkles and with scars. The lean form wearing a plain black suit was bowed, muscles and tendons withered by time. But his evil eyes were still young and bright as he smiled, carefully piloting his TARDIS into position before entering his final coordinates.

He had been on Gallifrey, not so long before (at least by Universal Time; from his perspective it had been decades) - summoned here by the High Council to help rescue the Doctor from the Death Zone. By some agency he didn't exactly understand he had been hurtled away from there, back to his TARDIS. He had wasted no time in leaving, but before he left he took some very interesting readings.

He knew the transduction barrier was unstable now, after Borusa's mad draining of power. That the Council would be in chaos, weak and rent from within, practically begging for leadership after the Doctor's predictable flight from responsibility. Now would be a most appropriate time for Gallifrey's most reviled, most corrupt, and (in his own opinion at least) greatest son to return home.


	7. Grooming

The Citadel was full of sounds now: streams of notes and tones that seemed to be slowly congealing into music. Tegan and Davros had not been able to hear it before, but now that they were walking though the corridors (Davros apparently knew enough about Earth customs to offer an arm, but Tegan declined) the music was obvious.

They passed more sleeping Time Lords, and were passed by Daleks, alone or in pairs, some dragging long tangled clots of cables behind them, or levitating machines and themselves through the air.

"And you say you aren't going to hurt them?" Tegan insisted.

"No, no," Davros said, patting at her arm and only looking the slightest put out when she drew it away. To herself, Tegan thought that if Davros was this flirtatious with every species he met, he must have left a string of half-Kaled children across the galaxy by now.

He went on, "The energies we could release from the deaths of all living Time Lords is far surpassed by the potential energies trapped in the Matrix. For centuries, for millennia, those who have died on Gallifrey have been held in chains.

"I will break those chains. I will release those trapped souls. The energy of their passage is what I require for my transformation. Their destruction would serve no purpose. And it would be – inauspicious."

Suddenly they were stepping over a familiar figure - Maxil, which meant that the next room was the Ring Garden. It was, and there dear and solid was the TARDIS, waiting for her.

"They were supposed to be here - ah, there they are." Davros pointed as a door on the far side opened, and Turlough came walking a bit too briskly towards them. With him was a slender man in a black uniform, with glasses and a faintly flushed face.

For that matter, Turlough was looking a little flushed too. Sweat gleamed along the edges of his hairline, and his tie was a bit loose.

Tegan considered. What if Davros wasn't the only flirtatious Kaled?

"Are you all right?" Turlough demanded, and Tegan brought her mind back to present events, instead of thinking about what might have been.

"Yes, I'm fine. And the Doctor?" She stared at the man in black, who stared back with guileless eyes. Despite his innocent expression, he looked like he could be very nasty.

"Nyder?" asked Davros, and the man in black took a slotted metal oblong from his pocket and pressed it to his ear, listening.

"He's in the Outer section, unharmed," Nyder reported.

"What are you going to do to him?" Turlough said, still demanding.

"Persuade him, of course," Davros purred. He stepped to Nyder's side and almost in lockstep they left, shoulders touching. They did not leave the two aliens alone, however. In their passage, a host of Daleks drifted into the room, hovering over the plants they could not pass between.

"Mind the pots," came Davros' voice from the corridor, and the Daleks stopped in mid-air. Then they must have adjusted the forcefields or whatever that allowed them to fly, because the square ceramic containers neatly laid out under them started to move as well. They squeaked across the tile floor as they moved, squeezing themselves into the corners of the room, leaving a clear area around Turlough, Tegan and the TARDIS.

The Daleks settled, a ring of ominous grey and black forms. They stared at Tegan and Turlough - or at least they pointed their eyestalks at them.

"Now what?" Tegan said uncertainly, staring back.

"The Harvest will begin as soon as the Doctor moves into position," one of the Daleks said, rolling close. "It will be complete when all Dalek units on Gallifrey have transcended into the realm of the Eternals. When that has occurred, the fungus will release the Time Lords. You will have approximately four hundred rels to retrieve the Doctor from the Panopticon and bring him to the TARDIS before Security forces revive.

"Excuse me, but how long is a rel?" Turlough asked, and after some back-and-forth they worked out that they would have something around eight minutes.

"Eight minutes…can we run from here to the Panopticon and back in eight minutes?" Tegan wiggled her toes in her shoes, judging distances in her head.

"Ah, well, we could use the TARDIS," Turlough suggested. "We could just materialise, grab him and leave. Perhaps we could go check the coordinates…"

He paused for a long moment, but the Daleks made no move to stop him. Slowly, carefully, he moved backwards to the TARDIS doors and opened them, and slipped inside with the quick motion of a retracting claw. Tegan bit her lip and followed.

"Or," Turlough said smugly, closing the TARDIS doors, "we can hop directly to the Doctor now, and we all leave." He smiled, a cynical one-sided smile, and then frowned at the controls. "I think." He touched more controls, and the enthusiasm drained out of him. "No, the magnetron is still holding us, here and now."

The vidscreen lit up; centred on it was one of the Daleks. "The magnetron will be deactivated after the Harvest."

"Rabbits," Tegan said. 'They've thought of everything, haven't they. So. What do we do now?"

"We wait. The Doctor has a sample of a spray that will stop the fungus and release the Time Lords. He may be able to synthesise more."

"How? He can't very well use the laboratories in the TARDIS."

"Tegan, he lives here." Turlough's hands darted at the controls, back and forth, trying to find some way to break the magnetron's grip. "Of course he knows where the laboratories in the Citadel are. So - we wait for him to either release the fungus repellent, or…"

"Or to give in to Davros' plan. Give in to Davros."

Turlough looked over the familiar white walls of the TARDIS around them. "We're safe in here, at least."

"Turlough, what if it doesn't work?"

"What?" he said, looking back up at her.

She wanted to pound her fists on something, preferably his stupid face: she settled for clenching them at her sides. "What if the Harvest fails, Turlough? And they don't all just disappear into eternity? What if they take it out on the Time Lords - or the Doctor?" Her stomach was churning at the thought of thousands of infuriated machine-monsters scouring the Citadel bare of life. "How are we supposed to save him from that?"

"I guess," he paused, "I guess we have to hope that it succeeds, then."

They looked at each other with almost identical expressions of misery.

* * *

The Doctor was on the ground level of the Citadel. He moved in starts and stops, trying to stay under cover, more than aware that for all he knew he was surrounded by invisible invaders, watching him, tracking his every move. He was trying to get to the Academy laboratories; hopefully the Daleks would not have thought to lock them down. With the equipment there, he could make more repellent - he hoped.

But for no reason that he could discern, he was having trouble walking. He found his gait uncertain, his mind confused. He couldn't seem to get his feet on the steps correctly; he either teetered on the edges or stepped too close and felt the stone bite into his toes. The walls wavered like painted canvas flats in his sight, as he kept doggedly stumbling down the corridor. Maybe it was hunger, or thirst: he couldn't remember when he had last taken a drink.

He fought to keep going, and he lost. Exhaustion pressed down on him like a heavy warm blanket, and finally he relaxed and submitted. He stopped and lay down on the stairs, watching dazedly the bright colourful flowers and the little decorative trickling spurts of water. Somehow he couldn't even muster up the will to duck his head under one of those freshets and drink.

The little fountains pulsed to the beat of the music condensing around him, which also seemed to match the rhythm of his heartbeats. But if that were the case - if the Daleks had taken over total environmental control of the Citadel - then he probably couldn't release enough fungus repellent to wake the other Time Lords. The invaders would simply turn down the ventilation, or turn it off entirely.

He looked up, vaguely, at the sound of booted steps behind him, coming closer and then stopping where he lay, on his hip and one elbow, somehow unable to force himself further up the stairs. The Doctor tilted his head back, and looked up at another familiar face.

Nyder, again.

"Always ready to kick a man when he's down, aren't you?" the Doctor asked, certain that those boots were soon going to be making painful contact with various sections of his anatomy.

"Oh no," said Davros, sweeping towards them from the opposite direction. The Doctor's mind somehow connected the sight of him, in his stark laboratory uniform, with some great white-crested wave preparing to crash onto the beach. "No, we need you quite healthy for this. Unharmed and in good condition."

His dark eyes moved over the Doctor, taking in his haggard appearance. "Here, have a perro fruit." Davros pulled a green oval object out of his pocket, and held it out invitingly.

Of course, the Doctor knew that he shouldn't take the fruit. It was probably full of drugs, or poison for that matter. Then he forgot that he knew that.

He made an unflattering mental comparison between Davros and his perro fruit and Eve and her apple, and then he forgot that comparison.

He knew that plants grown on other worlds might or might not be edible to him; and then he forgot.

All of the Doctor's objections to eating the fruit vanished like sand under the waves. He did not notice that Nyder was standing taut and rapt over him, frozen like a statue, his face hard with concentration. The muscles of his back shivered under his uniform as though he was moving some great weight.

The Doctor's hand reached out, paused, and then took the perro fruit. He bit into it, and Davros smiled, a rather alarming smile. The two Kaleds watched with sharp concentration as the Doctor ate, following the motion of lips and teeth and throat, making certain that he swallowed.

The fruit was tart and not quite big enough to sate the Doctor's thirst, but he ate it down to the lobed pit before pausing and asking, "Where are my companions?"

"Safely back at the TARDIS, waiting for you to finish."

"To finish what?" said the Doctor, absently pocketing the perro seed. He paid no attention as Nyder crouched down behind him, and a gloved hand slid into his pocket and took the seed back, and a small metal bottle of fungus repellent as well. In fact, he forgot the other man's touch almost as soon as it happened.

"To finish granting us access to the Matrix, and guiding us to our Harvest."

The Doctor shook his head back and forth, slowly, barely aware of Nyder's presence behind him. All his attention was on Davros, his devouring eyes and his terrible words.

"I will not let you commit genocide," he said, the words thick in his mouth. "Never. I won't help you, in any shape or form."

"Then we would have to force our way into the Matrix, which is not our intent. We might frighten them."

"Frighten?"

"Yes." In a few short words, Davros explained what the Matrix was, even as he had to Tegan, and he watched as those words struck the Doctor harder than any blows.

"Everyone is in there." The Doctor swallowed. "All my friends who have passed on, my teachers - trapped in there? But what happens if you let them go?"

"It will be up to them if they choose to take their memories with them. Of course if you don't help us, if you are not part of the circuit guiding them to release, they will probably all boil off like steam and leave nothing behind."

"A steam engine." The Doctor stared at the ceiling for a moment, not quite registering why this motion didn't put the back of his head against the cold stone steps. "The engine of the Harvest is a steam engine?"

"You are very perceptive. We are not here as destroyers, Doctor. We come as liberators. It is the passage of those Time Lord souls that will fire our machines with power and allow us to ascend."

"You don't know that," the Doctor said with more certainty than he felt. "Anything could happen. Or nothing. And then I suppose you would turn on the living Time Lords for your fuel."

"You can make it happen." Davros leaned forward and touched the Doctor's face for a moment, barely brushing it with the tips of his fingers. "Help us, and we leave this universe forever."

The Doctor rolled his head away from Davros' touch, hearing his hair rasp against Nyder's leather gloves. "And if I choose not to?"

"I am very much afraid that you have little choice. You see, Commander Nyder has a new talent, courtesy of the Reflectionists. Telepathgestion."

"Telepathgestion." The Doctor blinked, remembering a dead body he had seen on a planet about to burn, long ago. The memory was oddly blurred and faded, but he didn't realise that was of importance. He looked at Nyder, kneeling patiently above and behind him, supporting his head in his gloved hands. He didn't look any different. "Shouldn't he have quills then? All over him?"

"Not at all, not at all. He is not planning on eating your mind, after all. Just - editing it a bit."

"Editing?"

"Yes. We are going to find all your objections to what we are about to do. Then Nyder shall strip them out of your mind, one by one. And when he's done, he'll have this conversation for dessert. Then you will agree with us, you see."

Davros smiled. He sat on the steps, and cupped the Doctor's hands in his, gently, almost fondly. "Now, Lord President. You object because…?"

A flood of reasons rose in the Doctor's mind. The danger of giving Davros more power than he already had, the possible destruction of the Matrix, the risk of tampering with Rassilon's machineries, the screaming horror of Daleks with the powers of Eternals, the thought of great war-fleets that could materialise anywhere and then disappear, the nightmare of immortal war-machines beyond death. Every possible denial was sharp in his brain, waiting to strike out at his captors.

Those denials suddenly changed as Nyder's mind reached for his, inhaling his thoughts like smoke. The solid onrushing flood of reasons became clouds that vanished into nothingness. The Doctor shook, under Davros' hands and Nyder's, and they felt his shudders with something approaching raw delight.

The Doctor threw up barriers in his head, but Nyder pierced them handily. He had tested his mental skills in ways that the Doctor never had, tested them against subjects he could grind to destruction: he smashed through every wall, sundered every illusion, pried and reached and scraped until the Doctor's conscious mind was bare as a petal-stripped flower. He did not touch the Doctor's unconscious mind; there was no need. The drugged perro fruit had seen to that. It had shut the Doctor off from most of his memories. Once the drug had worn off, he would again be able to recall his objections, his denials, himself. But until then, he was as a child in their coldly capable hands.

"Lord President?" Davros prompted. "Do you oppose what we are about to do?" He waited tensely for the answer.

"No objections," the Doctor said emptily. His blue eyes too wide, he stared at them and into infinity at the same time, dazed into compliance.

He let them pull him to his feet, and went willingly with them as they walked him back along the corridor, back towards the Panopticon. He told them his appreciation, and they smiled and nodded and led him on. In the Panopticon were the robes and the Sash and the Rod and the Crown, the symbols of Time Lord power that the Doctor needed to complete the Harvest.

It had to be completed. That was all he knew, now.


	8. Final Arrangements

Tegan had given Turlough a quick run-down on what Davros claimed the Harvest really meant; he riposted with a chilling list of Dalek assaults, treacheries, conquests, and mass exterminations.

"Do you really expect a species like that - or their creator - to keep their word?" he finished up.

Tegan was pacing back and forth, heels clicking on the TARDIS floor. "I don't know, I don't know!" she fretted. "But if Davros is right, if this is something that the Doctor would want to do…"

"What I want to do is get out of here-"

"WITH the Doctor," Tegan snapped back. "We aren't leavin' him behind!"

"Tegan." Turlough paused, and interlaced his fingers in front of him, staring at them. "Have you realised that we could be caught up in all this? Davros might not have said what would happen to living souls when the whatever-it-is happened, but it might take us as well. Take our souls." His voice fell at the thought.

"We will not take anything from you without permission," the Dalek droned on the viewscreen. Behind it were several other Daleks, as still as stones.

"And can't you do something about that, Turlough?" she asked a bit helplessly. "We don't need them eavesdropping on us!"

Turlough turned his back on the viewscreen, and half-cupped his hand over his mouth. He gestured Tegan closer, and whispered in her ear.

"I think it's the same thing that made the TARDIS materialise in space and transmit its transponder signal to the Dalek fleet. Somewhere in the TARDIS is some Dalek device that is overriding my control - and the Doctor's."

"Can we find it?"

Turlough rolled his eyes. "I somehow doubt they made it easy to find."

"Well then, look, all right? I'll keep them talking; maybe they'll tell us somethin' we can use." She pulled herself straight and stared at the viewscreen, and the Dalek stared back.

"What did you mean, take from us by permission?" she asked, as Turlough ducked and started prying panels loose from the TARDIS control panel, looking inside for signs of alien inclusion.

"If you wish to give up a portion of your soul, you may."

Tegan breathed out a silent laugh. "And why exactly would I want to?"

"There is a part of your soul that is marked. As is the soul of your companion."

"Marked?" Turlough's head popped over the edge of the console, blue eyes wide and frightened. "What you do mean, marked?"

"There is a mark on your soul," the Daleks rasped. "The mark of an Eternal. The mark of the Black Guardian."

Turlough flinched as the Dalek continued. "The mark is of a black bird. In all of time and space, those who can see that mark will know that you are his creature." It turned its eyestalk to Tegan. "And you are marked as well. Your mark is-"

"If you say it's in the shape of a snake," Tegan said tensely, "I am going to scream like you would not believe."

The Daleks swivelled their eyestalks to look at one another. One finally spoke. "It is in the shape of a limbless reptile."

"Thanks. A. Lot." Tegan's words were bitten out through her teeth, which she had clenched to keep them from chattering. She had thought that she was free of the Mara forever, but apparently not.

A Dalek could not look inquisitive, but this one bobbed its eyestalk for a moment before going on. "You can choose to offer up only that marked portion of your soul. It will be taken away, and your soul will heal. And when we free the souls trapped in the Matrix, those parts belonging to the living will return to their homes."

"Their homes - you mean their bodies."

"Their what?" Turlough said, puzzled.

She hadn't wanted to mention this, but - "There's a part of - of me in the Time Lord's Matrix. So they can capture me when I die. Keep my memories and read them like a book." Tegan's lips were so tight that the lipstick on them seemed to float against her whitened flesh. "They'll probably think of me as a boring book, thin and dull like all human lives."

"Why would you want to take the mark of the Black Guardian off of me?" Turlough challenged the Daleks. "Why wouldn't you be on his side?"

The Dalek's voice droned with the timbre of a living machine. "The Black Guardian is an agent of Chaos. The Daleks are dedicated to rules, to logic, to order. We are the products of intelligent design. We-"

The lead Dalek stopped speaking. The Daleks behind it were craning their eyestalks upwards, their communication lights flickering madly on the sides of their domes. When it started speaking again, its words were faster. "The Doctor has chosen. He is preparing. You must decide now."

The picture on the viewscreen changed.

"Oh no," they both breathed together.

The viewer was showing the interior of the Panopticon. On the stone platform, a familiar blond figure was being reverently wrapped in the white robes of the President. The person dressing the Doctor, a woman with long dark hair, smiled as she stepped around him, adjusting his posture; her heavy red robe flowed around them both, trailing behind her like blood.

"He's going to do it," Turlough almost hissed, the tendons standing out in his neck for a moment. Then he bent and grimly went back to opening panels.

"Yeah, it looks like it. So." Tegan swallowed. "When the fungus starts to let go or whatever, wither up, we can't run there and back before the Time Lords wake up, can we? Not if we have to carry the Doctor on the way back."

"No," said Turlough from the floor, his voice a bit muffled.

"But if we were there, in the Panopticon." She turned her back to the viewscreen and whispered. "Maybe we could find a way to stop it. Get the Doctor away; get him back to the TARDIS-"

Turlough tugged at the hem of Tegan's skirt. When she looked down, he gestured for silence, and then pointed inside the panel he had just opened. Clamped to the centre of one of the clear glassine computer boards was a squat grey cylinder, like a tiny salt shaker covered with bumps and topped with a single blinking red light.

Tegan pointed at it, and silently mouthed the words, That's it.

Turlough nodded. He rose and whispered, "We go to the Panopticon, and I leave this panel open. As soon as we can, we grab the Doctor and bring him back here, throw that outside, and go."

They both stared at the closed TARDIS doors. There was a tightness in Tegan's throat, and when she glanced at Turlough she saw the stipple of sweat on his pale lips. They both knew they would be safe for as long as they remained here. There was no way the Daleks could get them out of here, unless they chose to leave.

"Just – open the doors, and go out to them." Slowly, she reached for the correct control. Her hand paused, faltered, and then Turlough's covered hers. Not forcing her hand down, but touching her as a friend would, to lend his strength.

If she had looked at his face again, she would have seen it creased with worry and uncertainty; and that might have been enough to change her mind. But she did not look.

"Thank you," she whispered, and with an effort that felt like lifting a tree, or some great block of stone, or perhaps her own coffin, she pulled the lever. The TARDIS doors opened with their familiar hum.

They exited the TARDIS (Turlough glanced backwards almost wistfully as he pulled the door closed behind him), and found the Daleks, as they expected. They did not expect Davros and Nyder, standing side by side at attention, clearly waiting for them.

"How did you know we would come out?" Tegan frowned.

"I predicted it." Davros smiled: a secretive and rather smug smile. "Shall we?"

He offered his arm to Tegan, and this time she took it. Behind them came Nyder and Turlough, most definitely not arm in arm. As they left the garden, the Daleks followed, and the plants closed in behind them like flowing water.

* * *

The Doctor hummed as he stood in the Panopticon. The humming seemed to rise out of him like smoke, drifting upwards and merging with the rising tide of the music, and the hum of the machines around him, and the Daleks circling overhead, and far above them all in orbit the ships hovered, engines turning, dancers moving in carefully rehearsed patterns, technicians adjusting and monitoring, scientists taking their readings, and excited children watching it all.

He vaguely felt the heavy gold-embroidered robes draped around him, the crested collar fitted to his shoulders, and something long and cold placed in his hands. Warm fingers folded the Doctor's fingers a bit tighter around the metal. Something deep in his mind remembered the weight, the feel of the embossed patterns in his hands, and connected them to a phrase: the Rod of Rassilon.

"Do I know you?" the Doctor wondered aloud, looking down at the woman dressing him. She had a sharp nose, dark eyes and brows and pale skin. Her long dark hair was loose over her red robe. Her hands were bare, deftly tugging at the heavy sash around his neck: two gold rings gleamed on one finger, clicking metal on metal. She was quite short, and somehow he had the impression that he should know her face - oddly enough, the face seemed to be associated with more than one name, in the vague blur under frosted glass that had replaced his memories.

"Yes," she said, her voice casual with familiarity. "I'm Esselle, and I'm here to help." She smiled up at him, eyes wide with excitement.

"Oh. Well, Esselle, thank you. It's a very thoughtful gesture; putting these things on by yourself is next to impossible." His own thoughts were floating in his head like birds against a blinding-white sky, their motion barely visible. He knew that there was something wrong with him: very wrong. But the urgency of the music was all around him, the responsibility, the knowledge of what he had to do. He drifted, letting Esselle move him as she twitched his clothes into position, and positioned him on the stone platform. He could feel the Rod of Rassilon in his grasp, but the arms holding it felt kilometres long: his hands seemed very far away, over the horizon, or perhaps far beneath his feet.

She touched his face. "The question mark. The open spiral, the central point…those are good signs for you," she breathed, tracing one finger over the Doctor's forehead, then touching his shirt collar where it rose from under the robes.

"Why are you here?"

"I'm here for Davros…and for you." She looked enviously at the Doctor, cupping his face in her hands. The shadows of the Daleks' passage overhead rolled over her ecstatic expression like clouds. "I am here to help you both complete your greatest task. This is the transcendence of Davros and his Daleks. The greatest genius this universe has ever created is going to shatter the bonds of mortality and ascend to eternity. You should be honoured to be a part of it."

"I am … I …" The Doctor fought to pierce through the veil that had been drawn between him and his memories, but he couldn't. He would draw up a memory, only to feel it slip out of his mental grasp and go plummeting away, out of his reach. All he could finally say was "It is - necessary."

"Yes, Doctor."

"I do know you," he frowned down at her. "You've - done this before, haven't you? Sent me away?"

"But this time you stay, and we go on. You and your friends stay," she said, and gestured to the great doors into the Panopticon as they rolled open.

Four people entered, and the Doctor's eyes skipped too quickly from one to the next. He knew them, but-

"Your companion Turlough, with the red hair; and your companion Tegan, in the skirt." Esselle was standing behind the Doctor now, and her prompting words seemed to come from nowhere.

"Of course," the Doctor sighed, feeling warm certainty wash over him.

"We had to come," said Tegan, stepping up onto the stone platform and standing at his right. She reached out and covered his hand on the Rod with her own.

"We had to," the one called Turlough echoed, his own hands moving as hers did. They stood in a line now, with the Rod between the three of them as an axis. They mirrored each other, moving their feet and shoulders to align themselves just so, and none of them really noticed how intently Davros was watching them, or how Nyder's face was taut with effort.

"So what do we do now?" Tegan said, and Davros smiled, wrapping one white-clad arm around her shoulder and looking at her with an expression of proud anticipation.

"Slide," he invited, and she did. She raised herself on her toes and let her feet slide out in front of her, her weight supported by Davros' arm. Beside her Turlough was sliding with Nyder bearing him up, and the Doctor was moving as well, his embroidery-stiffened robes rasping over the stone as he raised his face to the Daleks circling overhead and let himself be laid flat against the stone. When he heard his collar click against the floor, he looked up to see helpful Esselle leaning over him, sweat gleaming on her brow and arms trembling with the effort as she lowered him the last fraction.

"Are you all right?" he inquired politely.

"I'm fine, Doctor," she said, standing and rising to her feet. "Just a passing pain. It doesn't matter now."

"That's right," he said, his blue eyes drawn upwards again to the Daleks; great grey bells that softly chimed when they brushed against each other, hovering above them all, dipping and spinning and moving as though making some elaborate pattern with their passages. Out of the corner of his eyes he could see other Daleks moving to their machines, and that seemed very important, important and very dangerous: as dangerous as the three people now standing over him and his companions, staring down at them. Esselle at his head, Davros by Tegan's side, and Nyder with Turlough.

If the Doctor had looked to the right of the main doors, he would have seen a red-gemmed crown, the Coronet of Rassilon, which could be used to dominate the wills of others. The Coronet was not wired into the Daleks' machines; in fact it simply leaned against one of them, casually put aside when it was determined to be of no use. Nyder's control over living things was far more precise and sensitive. The Kaleds did not need the Coronet to force the Doctor and his companions to do as they willed. Nyder was more than capable, and only his too-wide eyes and his tight jaw muscles showed the strain he was under. The swooning joy, the iron certainty and rightness that throbbed through all their veins, came out from Nyder and was reflected back into him, and the circuit was almost more than any living man could bear – almost.

There was a rough noise, the sound of metal being drawn over stone. The Doctor raised his head a trifle, and saw a strange figure pacing rather than walking towards the stone platform. The three Kaleds turned to look.

The figure was dressed in the same dull red robes that Esselle wore, and a broad red band like a blindfold was around its head. Its arms were crossed on its chest, and jutting upwards from the grasp of each hand was the sharp silvery gleam of a sword, thrusting upwards like horns - or wings.

"Two of Swords," the Doctor said. "The forked lightning, the turning angles..." His mind wandered dazzled through cascades of imagery. Then the figure came closer, into the light that shone down on them, and the Doctor realised he knew that face, under the red headband. The eerie calm expression, and the eyes a bit too penetrating. Eyes which were alive and aware, and had in them not the slightest trace of sanity.

He suddenly found a whole chain of reasoning, and frantically pulled it into his consciousness. That chain pulled up a swarm of memories, filling in the blanks that had been his thoughts. He realised where he was, and with whom. He was trapped, trapped on Gallifrey and in the Panopticon, and his friends were here with him. Around him was the Citadel; under him was the Eye of Harmony. Over him were the Daleks, and the Dalek's creator. They were about to perform the Harvest - and he was a part of the crop.

And he knew the name of the man who had just entered.

Ravon.


	9. Transcendence

The music that had been rolling through the Panopticon, building in wave upon wave of sound, suddenly stopped. It was so silent that the Doctor could hear the blood thundering in his ears, and the breathing of Tegan and Turlough, prone on the platform beside him.

Then there was a sound. A name.

"Davros," said Ravon, his voice breathy and eyes rapt. He stepped up onto the platform, standing at the prone Doctor's feet, and the music rose again, in a triumph of shrilling notes as ecstatic as a sunrise. There were other sounds mixed in with the music: the sounds of gears grinding and engines thrumming with new power. Cascades of aeriels started to rise from the Daleks' machinery, waving upwards like metallised weeds, straining towards the stars. The shadows they cast looked horribly like letters in some unspeakable tongue.

The stone under the Doctor's body seemed to throb with the music – and was it also growing warmer? Impossible. The Doctor fought to hold his focus, to remember what was going on. He was struggling free of whatever had been done to him – just what had been done, he couldn't recall. But it was all wrong, terribly wrong, and it would only get worse unless he could find a way to stop it.

His eyes were locked on Ravon's face, taking in the too-white features, the shaking of his arms carrying the swords.

"What have you done to him?" he wondered aloud. He knew the man's name, and connected it with the mental image of a furious boy with a uniform and a knife, and also with a calm-eyed man sitting in a metal chair. Neither image matched this madman, and yet they were all the same.

"He has been studying the Patterns of the Harvest with us. With me," said Esselle proudly. "He has stepped a little ahead of us, that is all. We will all be together soon."

"Together," Ravon said, and darted his eyes too swiftly at Davros and Nyder before going back to staring at Esselle. Those two men smiled, and reached for the swords in Ravon's hands.

The Doctor had the distinctly dark impression that introducing long pieces of sharp metal into this mysterious procedure was not a good thing at all. Then he blinked, puzzled. Davros and Nyder were each holding a sword, straight out in front of them with the tips touching, but Ravon was still holding two swords. He must have been carrying them two and two. No wonder his arms had been trembling.

"Aren't those a bit primitive?"

"These are old swords," Davros replied, pacing around the Doctor until he stood at his head. All four of the standing Kaleds had moved as though around the dial of a clock; Ravon now stood by Tegan, and Esselle by Turlough, while Davros and Nyder faced each other from the Doctor's head and feet.

Davros continued, "They were carried in the Great War. They have sent many souls out of their bodies, and some on even further. It seemed - appropriate - to use them as part of the transmission array."

He hefted the sword, admiring the way the metal was darkened with time, how the vine-engraved hilt felt in his hand. Even after all these centuries, the fine steel still held a bright edge, standing out against the blade like the horizon at dawn.

Tegan whispered upwards to the red-robed Ravon, "Could you do me a favour?" She was not quite certain why she was feeling so warm and muzzy, but an insistent memory of a man who was not quite a man drove her to speak.

He did not so much look at her as point his face downwards in her direction. "Yes?" he said, reaching across to hand his second remaining sword to Esselle; their fingers met on the hilt and seemed to caress for a moment before she stood straight, the sword pointing upwards in her grasp.

"If you meet an Eternal named Marriner out there, up there, whatever? Tell him – I hope he finds what he's looking for."

"I will tell him," Ravon said, his eyes drifting back up to stare at something only he could see.

The Daleks were intensely at work on their equipment. Fine metal wires started to issue from those machines, and went crawling towards the platform and onto it, wrapping around the limbs of Esselle and Ravon like water-weeds. The wires rasped as they moved over the stones, twisting in time to the music. The Doctor and his companions watched as those wires twined upwards and sank themselves into Esselle's hair, and wound themselves around and under Ravon's headband.

The Doctor remembered: neural arrays. The Reflectionists of Skaro used metal brain implants to share information, mind to mind. Something had happened to Ravon – he wasn't quite sure what – and he had those arrays as well, apparently.

Esselle and Ravon were suddenly rapt and staring, their faces identically filled with concentration. Nyder was almost as intense. The Doctor racked his own brains, trying to think of a way to stop this. The mental focus required for the Harvest must be immense; if he could only distract them for an instant. One sneeze and the whole energy wave-form would collapse.

Davros raised his clenched hands high, the sword pointing skywards, and the Daleks gave a metallic drone that was not quite a moan.

He declared, "We are here and we are ready. We have made our preparations, of mind and body and soul. The focus is here, and the stars are right. We are enacting the Final Rite of Rassilon, as it was written. Now we shall ascend to the level of the Eternals."

Rassilon. That was something that might capture Davros' attention. "What did Rassilon say?" the Doctor whispered, staring up at Davros. "When you entered his tomb?"

Davros smiled, with neat little white teeth, and whispered back, "Hello again."

The Doctor breathed faster and faster, feeling his companion's cold fingers against his, locked around the Rod of Rassilon. The Sash under his neck was buzzing with the rhythm of the invaders' music, and he was suddenly certain that somehow, Davros had found some way to penetrate to the very heart of Gallifreyan power – not with force of arms, but with the knowledge he had learned, far away on Biblios.

The stone platform under him was hot enough to be uncomfortable now (he was shielded by his heavy robes, but he worried about Tegan's bare calves) and his mind lurched with horror as he remembered what lay under him, deep under the Citadel. If the invaders had somehow managed to tap into the powers of the Eye of Harmony, they could do anything.

Including destroy Gallifrey. And take a chunk out of the surrounding galaxy, as well.

Arcs of energy were starting to form around the platform, humming through the air with the sound of angry bees, leaping from aerial to aerial with crisp snapping noises. If any of the celebrants moved, those energies might ground through them, to lethal effect.

"You've got to stop this!" the Doctor shouted, vainly. He was barely audible above the creaking of metal and the thundering music, but he forced all the strength his body lacked into those words.

Nyder and Davros exchanged glances, and the Security Commander gave the barest twitch before returning to his invisible labours. He could keep the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough immobile while still holding the various formulae of the Rite in his head; he did not have the extra time to re-erase the Doctor's mind. Not that it mattered, now. It was far too late.

The almost frantic Doctor turned his attention to the man at his feet, letting the thoughts that were swimming wild in his head come spilling out. "Nyder! Think, man! The best fuel for an animal is the meat of its own kind, the best thing to lift Davros' soul to Eternity would be the destruction of Esselle's soul! Her soul is his; you're sacrificing her for him!"

"I would do the same." Nyder's face was a sweating white statue, locked into an expression of terrible devotion.

The Doctor lashed out with his words, trying to wake them all to what was about to happen. "How long has he been grooming you, coddling you for this? He's using you, using you up!"

He turned his attention back to the man at the heart of all this. "Davros! This isn't about you; this isn't about Kaleds becoming Eternals. It's the Daleks, Davros." He raised his head a little bit. "The Daleks will burn you to gain their own immortality!" Those same Daleks were around them in a solid ring of malevolent metal, and the air overhead was filled with a giant three-dimensional cluster of them, moving with the delicate precision of an autonomous surgical array or a living sculpture.

The Doctor stared up at Davros, his crisp white uniform, the gleaming sword pointing towards the stars, the golden halo.

Halo?

No: it was the Crown of Rassilon, the key to opening the Matrix, being borne aloft by a wave of metal filaments. The Daleks' watching eyestalks pivoted to watch it. It rose over Davros' head, and higher, and he gently slid the tip of his sword into it and guided it down, down to the Doctor.

It hovered over him, the gems glowing between the twists of animate wire. Ball bearings rolled around the rim, clicking together and apart as they looped and spun with no attention to gravity. Then the Crown sank, lower, the shadow of it crossing the Doctor's dismayed face, and started to set itself onto his head.

The Doctor suddenly felt his neck muscles go slack. He tried to close his mind, but he could not: he was the President, sensitised to the Matrix, and it wanted to open for him. More: now he knew what was inside, could imagine the trapped souls of generations of Time Lords waiting for him to free them, and he felt their grasping hands out of the dark as a warm and living presence, infinitely familiar, needing his help.

The Matrix opened, and with his mind's eye he saw – everything.

* * *

In the Panopticon, an energy pattern of tremendous complexity was coming into existence, building itself level by level, reflecting inwards and outwards on itself, coaxed and guided by the Daleks' machines and by the thoughts and wills of the four Kaleds who stood in a circle, holding swords.

All around the Panopticon, throughout the Citadel, the slumbering Time Lords lay in their patterns, positioned with careful care by the same fungus that held them unconscious.

Above them all in the Dalek-Kaled war ships, machines were aligned and charging, and thousands of Kaleds and Reflectionists danced in great spirals and circles. The patterns of their steps, the joy in their hearts, were an integral part of the Harvest.

In the centre of the dance was Prime Mokaska, her many long insectile legs flashing at angles impossible for any biped, her heavy gilded breasts jiggling as she twisted and turned and stamped, her movements drawing angles and shapes through the air. Her arms flashed with gilt and sweat as she moved them in great sweeping strokes, and the sweat that flew from her long red pelt spattered the other dancers with hot droplets that smelled like burning flowers. The sounds of her tines and fingernails clicking on the floor were a bright staccato rhythm weaving in and out of the Daleks' music.

And the people danced, and the Daleks calculated, and the music swelled, and the machines focused and shifted and switched and balanced. An unbearable tension was drawing tighter around them, as the energy wave rose and fell, and then rose higher, and higher...

* * *

The alien music shrilled through the corridors of the Citadel. The TARDIS heard, and despaired.

Around her central core, a tiny string of metal spheres despaired with her. They were part of her and also apart: probes designed by Davros and cunningly introduced into her interior, long ago. They had been designed to subtly influence her thinking and her decisions, and also to show her certain information on the future that would be of great interest to her. But over the years and the light-years, the Doctor's TARDIS and Davros' spheres had spoken together, felt together, worked together, until they were close to being one.

~There is no focus,~ she thought to the probes. She could see the wave reaching to complete itself, to flood outwards and upwards and sweep the Kaleds and the Daleks to Eternity, but the wave endlessly fell back instead. The energy was there, but... ~It is not enough.~

~Davros is the focus. It must be enough. It must be!~ The probes shuddered with the sound of the Rite at its peak, frozen like an engine on the verge of either starting or tearing itself apart.

~You could make me the focus.~ The TARDIS knew that; that she had so allowed these intruders into her self and her circuits and her heart, that they might be able to control her.

The reply was frantic with emotion. ~TARDIS, we cannot.~

~Why not?~

~We love you, TARDIS. More than we love our creator, more than we love the Harvest. We will not make you. You must choose.~

The TARDIS looked, and felt, and thought. And chose.

~It will not be for nothing,~ and she reached.

She was a single filament of blue energy, invisible and immaterial and irresistible. The alien ships did not detect what she was doing. The Citadel's computers were blinded by the aliens' infiltration. But to the Daleks her touch was a suddenly correct and complete equation; to the dancers she was a perfect union of motion and music; to Davros she was the brush of an equal mind.

The Doctor in the Matrix, swimming among a thousand dark forms, desperately trying to find them and contact them and guide them, never sensed her at all.

She touched, she balanced, and the wave crested over into Eternity.

* * *

The music came together in a single note that shrilled on and on, pouring through the Panopticon like liquid joy: sound so solid it could be felt with the skin, thundering and howling, with sizzling blue and the taste of alien seas and the smell of Time itself.

Light suddenly blazed around the standing figures, and the four swords swept down to touch tip to tip over the Doctor's hearts. Esselle opened her mouth in a great O and howled, eyes closed. Her hands left the sword hilt in her grasp and flashed sideways, grasping Nyder's and Davros' hands as they reached for her as well, their hands moving faster than the eye could follow. Ravon had reached as well, and for a single lightning instant, they were frozen; their hands joined in a great circle and the four swords hovering between them, floating in the light that burned from their bodies. Then they vanished, and their captives screamed.

They screamed, feeling something being stripped from them, like red-hot wire slicing through their flesh as it was pulled free; like something squeezed out of their heart or mind - or souls. They screamed as they felt that hair-fine strand of themselves shrieking upwards, reeling away, some line caught in the mouth of an abyssal fish as it soared into the deeps. Tegan and Turlough screamed; the Doctor's cry went on and on, as he felt the Matrix spill open and the great flood of Time Lord souls go free.

The Daleks vanished, with the clangour of a thousand joyous cymbals. With them went their machines. For a single breathless moment the swords hung in midair, suspended – and then they vanished as well.

Settling around the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough was a drift of black and red and white cloth, uniforms and robes heavy with sweat. A red headband fluttered down and landed limp on the stones, like a shed snakeskin. The last remains of Davros and his companions on Gallifrey.

* * *

The Master's TARDIS materialised some thousands of kilometres above Gallifrey. It hovered in orbit, quickly melting its exterior to look like a broadcast antennae for the transduction barrier. And it awaited further orders.

The Master frowned and tapped a dial with one withered finger. He shouldn't be here: he should be in the arsenal of the Citadel! From there he could arm himself, and also override the internal security grid. He was at the correct coordinates in time; but the spatial coordinates were all wrong. If he didn't get out of here soon, Central Control would spot him.

Then the alarms started to ring. All of them. There were ships in orbit around Gallifrey, ships where no ships were permitted, ships of unknown design and tremendous size, and they were circling his position, weaving in and out, as though he was at the centre of some invisible whirlpool and they were leaves caught in its currents.

The Master looked down, and he saw.

He saw through the metal and material of his TARDIS: saw not with the eyes of his body, but with the eyes of his soul. He saw crudely and imperfectly - indeed the word 'saw' was not really accurate. He sensed, or smelled, or felt, almost as much as he saw.

He saw something rising from the surface of Gallifrey, a cruciform blaze of light, and eyes, and exulting voices. Something great and terrible and alive passed through and over and around him, washing over his body, sending his nerves shaking with equal doses of agony and joy.

Joy! Joy shouted in his blood, thrilled through his body-

No! No! Not his joy!

He clawed frantically at the TARDIS controls. He could feel the unnatural energies of that - of whatever that had been coursing through his body. His single heart thudded an uneven counterpart to the shrieks of those - things - that had passed through him. Things that must have attacked Gallifrey, and departed now in triumph.

His eyes suddenly filled with tears; he blinked them away and finally, finally, dematerialised. Once he was safe on the Void, he fell to his knees, curling forward until his forehead touched the cold floor.

They had seen him.

They had seen him. They had passed through him and read his mind and body and soul as though they were a children's primer.

They knew him. They would follow him. They would find him if it pleased them to, hunt him to the end of time -

NO! He set his TARDIS hurtling deeper and deeper into the Vortex, even as he crawled to his feet and stumbled into his machine's depths. Somewhere in here there was technology that would change him, that would hide him, that would mask him, body and mind and soul. He would escape them. He would run. Run and run, and never stop running.


	10. Reborn

The Doctor spoke weakly to the suddenly empty room. "Are they gone?"

All three of them were suddenly cold, and their ears rang with silence. The only sound was their breathing. It was Tegan who first managed to uncurl her stiff fingers from around the Rod and sit up.

"Everything's gone," she said wonderingly. "The Daleks, the machines-"

"But not their clothes," Turlough interrupted; he had turned his head to the left and saw Ravon's robes there in a loose pile. "Guess they lost their pants after all."

The Doctor sat up, and found Nyder's high black boots standing at his own feet, empty, the clothes of their previous owner draped around them. There was a tiny clattering noise as Nyder's glasses slipped down the stone steps.

He looked around the Panopticon, which seemed hollow as a seashell now, after seeing it filled to overflowing with music and power. No, not quite empty. One of the Citadel Guards was lying against one wall, layered in the familiar white fungus, but as he watched the fungus started to fall off the guard's boots, peeling and flaking away like a pie crust.

"The fungus," he said, pointing.

"Yes. Oh, no! We've got eight minutes!" Tegan dragged herself to her feet, stumbled once, and then started tugging at the Doctor. "Doctor, come on!"

They got up, and helped up Turlough in turn, and the three of them navigated the stone steps off the platform. But at the bottom, the Doctor cried "Wait!" and turned back. "Help me with these!"

"Help you?" she asked. The Doctor started tugging at the ceremonial robes, and with six hands at the task, they managed to drag the headpiece and the robes off. The Doctor carefully draped them in the centre of the platform, added the Crown to the top, and then turned on one heel (which nearly spun out from under him, he was weaker than he thought) and ran.

He ran, and then he trotted. Tegan and Turlough kept up as best they could, fighting their own exhaustion, watching as the figures they passed grew more and more uncovered. When they finally stepped over Maxil outside the Garden room, only a thin strand of the fungus lay around his neck, and his eyes were rolling alarmingly behind his closed lids.

"We've got to go!" Turlough was first to the TARDIS door, opening it and dashing inside. He slid to his knees in front of an opened panel, grabbed the Dalek cylinder and cracked it free from the circuit board with brutal haste. The Doctor's hands were already at the controls as Turlough tossed the device underhand, out the closing doors.

Outside, the cylinder splashed against the stones, turning into a stream of quicksilver spheres that promptly vanished away, just as a rather muddled Maxil peered through the doors.

There was nothing to see of course, and he turned and went back to patrol, tugging absently at his collar which seemed oddly dank all of a sudden. Hopefully nobody had noticed him leaning against the wall for a quick rest.

* * *

The Doctor and Turlough were frantically working the TARDIS controls as Tegan looked on, her face tight with upset.

"No trace of the vortex magnetron," the Doctor muttered. "Turlough, that thing you threw outside was?"

"A Dalek probe of some sort, we found it attached to the TARDIS," he replied.

The Doctor shot a quick look at Turlough. "How did you know where to look?"

"I didn't. A lucky guess. But I knew it had to be there, or something like it: it's not like the TARDIS would just stop in space and spill all her data to the Daleks for no reason."

"Doctor, what happened? Did it work?"

"There's - no sign of the Daleks in Gallifrey's orbit." He swallowed, suddenly ill. "They're gone." Possibly forever, he did not say, but he hoped.

"All right. Well, what was all that about, with your robes?" Tegan asked. She was stiff and cold all of a sudden, after baking on the stone platform during the ritual, and there was a vague phantom pain somewhere in her like the memory of a stomach ache. But she wanted answers, now.

"What?" said the Doctor, too lightly, his hands a little too tight on the controls.

"Why did you leave the President's robes in the middle of the Panopticon? It was to fool the Time Lords, wasn't it?"

"Well, I," the Doctor paused, and ran nervous fingers through his hair. Then he started over - or tried to. Tegan interrupted.

"Because if so I think it's a pretty rotten thing to do, Doctor. They'll think you're dead. And right now, you're the only one who can tell them about the Matrix. What it really was, and what's happened to it. How can you just turn your back and run away and let them think you're dead?"

"Well, it's certainly one way to disqualify myself from playing President of Gallifrey," he snapped.

Her voice was cold. "And why are you so keen on running away from that? If you were President, you could change things-"

"No, Tegan. No. They would change me. And for the worse."

"Doctor," Turlough said hesitantly.

"Not now, Turlough," he muttered, scowling at Tegan.

"I think you had better look."

"What?" the Doctor said, finally looking up, and was dumbstruck by the sight of the man standing at the far side of the TARDIS console, watching the three of them.

* * *

The man's clothes were white, and his hair was white as well: a white that almost hurt to look at. His eyes were dark and yet somehow they were full of light as well: glowing like stars against the vibrant blackness of space. He smiled at them, and little familiar lines formed at the sides of his mouth, even though his skin was as smooth and poreless as marble. It was a deeply peaceful smile, a benevolent smile. The smile of a man who could not be hurt by anything, ever again.

Perhaps not even the smile of a man, at all.

"Davros," the Doctor whispered.

"No," the other man corrected.

"How did you get in here?" Tegan wondered aloud, and then shivered a little as those too-dark, too-bright eyes turned to her.

"I was already here," he replied; his voice seemed to have the hint of an echo in it now, as though coming from the throat of a giant.

The Doctor looked at his companions, and flinched. Suddenly their hair looked dull, their skin rough and parched. Compared to the glassy perfection that stood across from them, they looked like raw, unfinished beings.

Turlough's shoulders were hunched, his fists clenched. Clearly he was considering trying to rush Davros, either to get him away from the console or perhaps to run past him and hide in the TARDIS. The white-haired man looked at him and smiled wider.

"You're very attractive when you're scared," he almost purred.

Turlough looked exasperated for a moment. "Oh, not you too!"

"No, not really."

It was Tegan who saw the truth first. She looked at Davros, and bit her lip, and finally said, "Kamelion?"

"Yes!"

Kamelion. Of course, the shape shifting robot – the Doctor had thought it was safe, deep inside the TARDIS. Kamelion had not been designed to have willpower: it had been made to take the form that others wished of it. So if it had taken on this strange version of Davros' form, with white hair and too-knowing eyes, then the most likely reason was that it was under another's influence.

"Kamelion, where is Davros?" the Doctor asked softly.

"Davros was here. He is here, and he will be here. He is a part of every atom, every moment, of all of us. He has joined the Eternals."

"And the Daleks?"

"They have gone on – some of them. Some were not great enough, but now all have seen the path. They know that it is possible for a Dalek to ascend, and that journey will be the focus of their species for all time."

Compared to the Daleks' previous goal of universal extermination, this sounded like an improvement. But the Doctor was more concerned about Kamelion being under Davros' control - maybe.

"Kamelion, you have to fight him." The Doctor held out one hand, not too far. He didn't want to frighten Kamelion. He reached out with his mind as well, gently, but wasn't certain he had made contact. His head was still too full of static. "Let me help you-"

"Fight him?" the robot interrupting, tilting its head - Davros' head really - a bit to one side. "Davros is not forcing me into this shape. He came and he saw me – all of me, all my self and my past and my memories – and he thought me quite marvellous. And I – I found him a marvel, as well."

The Doctor frowned a little. Kamelion was shuddering, as though in some pain – or perhaps ecstasy.

"Are you all right?" Tegan dared to ask.

"I am – wounded. Even as you are."

"Even as I am?"

"Your souls are – cut. The pain you feel, that is the pain of a soul that is wounded. And now I feel that pain too. I would not trade this pain for anything in the universe."

Kamelion smiled, and the control room seemed to brighten for an instant. "Davros told me a great and powerful truth, Doctor. He told me that everything that is loved has a soul. And that a well-loved sword has a combative soul, and that a well-loved tool has a creative soul." Its hand was pressed flat to its chest. "And that this pain, this pain that I feel right now, is a mark that I, too, have a soul. That I can be loved, and as a living sentient organism I can love as well. That I can go on."

Tears were running down the pseudo-Davros' face; Tegan noticed with fascination that they did not drip off, but instead rolled down the jawline and neck to the collar, where they vanished. Was Kamelion making tiny droplets of transparent flesh creep over its camouflaged skin, to simulate weeping?

"But you weren't out there in the Panopticon-"

"I knew that the Harvest was coming; I could feel it. I – wanted to be a part of it. I wanted it, without influence from another! I wanted it! And so I offered myself. I do not regret it." Its attention moved to Tegan and Turlough. "You offered too."

"What did you offer?" said the Doctor, rounding on them, his eyes suddenly furious.

Turlough swallowed before he answered. "The Daleks said that the Black Guardian had put a mark on my soul. That they would take that mark off, if I volunteered for the – Harvest. Take that mark, and nothing more."

"And for me," Tegan ran one hand up her arm, as though wiping away some loathsome touch. "Well, the same deal. But it was only after we saw that you had decided to help, too."

"Oh, no." The Doctor's voice was suddenly deeply, inhumanly sad. "You did it for me? Didn't you consider that they might have coerced me, or forced me, or drugged me-"

"Well, did they?" she asked.

"I don't know." He gritted his teeth and stared at nothing. "I don't remember. I don't remember why I decided. They did something to me – I think. And now they may have done something to you as well..."

"Wait here!" he shouted, and dashed away into the interior of the TARDIS.

"Davros owes you both a favour," Kamelion stated rather than said, once the sounds of the Doctor's footsteps had faded away.

"What sort of a favour?" Turlough challenged.

"He is an Eternal. I imagine he could give you – anything at all that you truly desired." It blinked, slowly, as though enjoying the sensation; it was probably only Tegan's imagination that Davros' eyes glowed faintly through their lids. "But only if you truly desired it."

Turlough's thoughts were written plain on his face: wealth, and lots of it. He was just trying to visualise the upper limits of his desire for wealth (and being secretly delighted in not finding them at all) when the Doctor returned, holding what looked like an empty picture frame surrounding clear glass. When he waved it triumphantly, they could see fine traces of circuitry winking in and out of sight, embedded within the glass.

"An aura display; an amusing toy on a number of planets. But with a little adjustment," the Doctor applied his sonic screwdriver to a corner of the reader, and it squealed in what sounded like protest, "it makes a perfectly adequate ad-hoc soul reader."

He hesitated for a long moment, then held the frame out towards Tegan, facing her. She barely had time to say "Hey!" before the frame flashed, and turned dark. The Doctor looked at whatever the reader was showing him.

"Well, let me see then!" said Tegan, moving around the console to his side (the pseudo-Davros stepped aside to let her pass, but she didn't miss the way its eyes lingered on her arms). She looked and saw herself, if somehow she had been transformed into a neon disco ball. She immediately felt that the colours in the picture were familiar to her, like the pattern of a favourite dress or a sunset she couldn't quite remember. Her face and body were crawling all over with multicoloured lights in the frame – except for one place.

Her arm. One arm showed a plain strip of light grey up the side, the colour of ashes. She touched the screen and felt it cold under her fingertips.

"The M – the mark is gone, isn't it."

"The mark?"

"The mark of the M-Mara, on my soul. It's gone. Finally."

"Well go on then," Turlough muttered.

The Doctor repeated the process, and showed Turlough his soul-enhanced picture: a blank spot on his chest might or might not have been in the rough outline of a bird, among the great coils of blue and violet. Then he gritted his teeth, and held the frame out away from him, at arms'-length. It flashed, and the Doctor saw his own face and shoulders, surrounded by great washes of coloured light like the facets of some invisible gem, or the petals of a flower.

"Still there," he said, and then frowned. Looking closer, he saw the single finest spiralling grey line over his face and forehead, almost a question mark. He touched his own face, and felt nothing different. But the mark was there – or rather the absence. The place where a single fine strand had been peeled from his soul, like a slice of rind from a fruit (the image of a green fruit suddenly lurched into the Doctor's mind, and then vanished).

The Doctor turned to look just as Davros suddenly seemed to blur away in a sideways rain of colour, to be replaced by a delicate silvery figure. Kamelion's natural form. The robot tilted its head, and lights danced in its exposed circuitry in a sort of visual laughter.

"It was worth it," Kamelion said. "Believe me. Even if the Time Lords never discover what you did, it was worth it."

"Oh, but they will. Won't they," the Doctor said, handing the frame absently to Tegan before reaching for the controls. "We have to get completely out of here before they get their feet back under them."

"So you are just going to leave them, and they'll think you really are dead. With whatever the Daleks and Davros did to them, you're not going to help them?" There was a rough note of anger and fear in Tegan's question, but the Doctor did not notice.

"Gallifrey Control isn't hailing us, I wonder why?" he murmured.

"Doctor, I need to know why you won't help them!" she insisted. "Now! Because if I can't believe in what you do, and why you do it, then, then...I don't want to travel with you anymore."

The Doctor's hands froze on the controls, and his eyes were wide as he looked at her. "You don't understand..."

"That's right, I don't understand you. Maybe I never did. Maybe it was all some sort of alien morality that I thought I understood but I never really could." She tensed her body, swallowed, and said familiar words.

"Doctor, I want to go home."

"Tegan..." but his sympathetic tone did not sway her.

"I want to go home now!" she insisted. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Kamelion's arms flash to the edge of the control panel and grip tight, and instinctively she did the same with her free hand (her other hand was still clutching the soul reader). So she was prepared when the TARDIS shook and rang like a steel bee caught in a spiderweb. The Doctor and Turlough tumbled to the floor; she balanced, impossibly, on her heels and on her rage. Her hair was suddenly haloed in blinding white light, as the TARDIS doors opened behind her.

"The time corridor!" the Doctor shouted, trying to rise to his feet and reach the controls. The TARDIS shook vexingly, just at the right time to spill him again. "You – Tegan, you can't! You don't know where it will take you-"

"To Earth, Doctor. You said so yourself," Tegan said, shoving herself away from the console and moving grimly towards the doors.

"No, no, don't leave! Not like this!"

"I must. I'm sorry." She walked too quickly, almost running, and the tap of her heels and the sight of her bare calves (still faintly marked with red from the heat of the Panopticon platform) was the last he knew of her. Her footsteps suddenly echoing, as though striding across the ceiling of the sky, and then gone.

The TARDIS stopped shaking. The Doctor rose and then stood paralysed; and it was Turlough who went to the TARDIS controls and read what her instruments were reporting.

"Doctor, the corridor's thinning out. If we don't close the doors, we'll be open to space..."

The Doctor turned, heavily, moving like his body was wrapped in lead. He touched the TARDIS console, and the doors swung softly shut.

* * *

The TARDIS had many libraries in the endless windings of her interior: dusty libraries, locked libraries, libraries full of volumes written on sheets of ice or mica or crystal, libraries filled with strange atmospheres or pungent alien perfumes or silence.

The Doctor sat in a smaller library, in a warm chair that sighed with pleasure at his movements. Around him were leather bindings, ceramic scroll cases, bundles of reed paper. Books and records from many worlds, gathered from many times. Great amber glass globes hovered overhead, bathing the room and the brilliantly enamelled shelves in a dim and intimate light. And thrumming through the air was the weaving beats of music, sweet and dear music. Music from home.

A book on soul restoration lay open in his lap, forgotten. He had been reading, researching what had happened to him, but when the music had come on (cued automatically by his presence and stillness) he had just stretched back into the chair and let the music surround him. It was like some desperately thirsty part of him was drinking in the notes.

He wondered where Turlough was. He had been wounded too, the Doctor should look after him, try to explain-

"Hello," said Turlough, sitting in the chair across from the Doctor; the chair wriggled a little at his touch. The Doctor slitted his eyes and looked at the other man: his red hair combed, his rumpled clothes carefully brushed, and finally decided, "No."

"No," Turlough agreed, and faded into Kamelion. "May I sit and listen with you?"

"Where is Turlough?"

"I believe he is attempting to remember some early Trion meditation techniques," Kamelion offered. Its slight figure lay against the chair cushions, golden lights reflecting on its silvery not-flesh. "That is what he needs, right now. And I – I would like to be here."

"Even though – never mind." If Kamelion was feeling strong enough to remain out in the open as it were, he should encourage it. "Of course you can stay."

Kamelion and the Doctor sat silent, and let the music wash over their souls. Around them, the TARDIS listened, and healed with them.

* * *

Tegan was in a world of screaming red. Red was all around her, red sand scoured her face in the hot wind and gritted under her feet. Blazing orange sunlight as thick as liquid gold flowed around her and sent her shadow as a long black finger pointing across the dunes, covered with low scrubby plants.

To most humans, this would have been a frightening and alien landscape. But not to Tegan. She squinted, looking at the horizon. There was something familiar about...

"Oh no you didn't," she intoned slowly, and turned.

She turned, and saw the outrageous towering presence, like a great stone whale breaching endlessly from the earth, blazing crimson in the setting sun. Ayers Rock. Uluru.

She was home.

"Davros, you – you bastard!" She laughed. "You brilliant bastard." She'd wanted to go home, and he'd delivered her – not just to the right planet, but to the right continent as well. Her mind shivered for a moment at the sort of power that implied, and then steadied.

She considered. Uluru was part of a national park – or would be, depending on when she was. She tensed for a moment, then relaxed when she saw the ghost of tire tracks on the hard soil under her feet; she was at least in post-industrial Australia, not the 1800's or something. Bit hard making her way back then, she imagined.

But this late in the day, there might be tourists, here to see the great monolith change colours with the setting sun. She wondered if she should stay here, or if it would be worth trying to walk out to a larger road. She wasn't dressed for it, but that wind had felt like winter, so she shouldn't get too cold-

"Hey!" shouted a distant voice, accompanied by the revving of a motor. Tegan turned and smiled, blindingly bright, at the sight of a rough little Jeep, battered and dented, rolling towards her with an uneasy wobble that spoke of hard usage. But it looked sound enough to get her out of here.

When the Jeep stopped beside her, she saw that the driver was a young woman, with a smug expression and something a bit odd about her eyes. Not a tourist, or maybe she was: there was something particularly mismatched about her clothes, an almost Victorian-looking jacket paired with bright leggings and a wide belt. That jumble of styles made Tegan think of the Doctor, as he had been when she first met him. She'd been hoping not to think of him for, well, for a little while longer yet.

"Need a lift?" the woman asked.

"Yes, please. Thank you," Tegan replied.

"I'm Eliza," the woman introduced herself.

"Tegan. I was thinking I might have to spend the," night, she was going to say, but then she saw what was sitting in the Jeep's back seat. Eliza looked a bit abashed as she followed Tegan's gaze.

The thing in the back seat was a mask, primitive-looking but not aborigine. A mask formed out of a skull, with fangs and crinkled brow-ridges and wide dark eye sockets, and it belonged to no earthly animal that Tegan could imagine.

Slowly, she put her foot up on the step, standing high and balancing herself on the roof. This let her see the tracks of the Jeep, which proceeded straight away from them, crisp and new, over a low rise and down – and then stopped, in the middle of the road. As though the Jeep had materialised out of nowhere, right where she needed a lift...

She stepped down and looked at Eliza. Her multi-era clothes, the bracelet on one wrist glowing with multicoloured circuitry, and the air of a traveller who has seen more than is quite right to see. "You're not from around here, are you?"

"No." Eliza smiled, and shook the sand out of her hair. "But here is pretty great, innit?"

Tegan smelled the sharp dust, heard the lowing winds and felt the bright golden kiss of her home sun.

"Yeah," she said, sitting down and letting Eliza send the Jeep churning over the flat-packed earth. "It's pretty great, all right." But when she looked at the skies over her, she imagined a pair of blue eyes that she might never see again. Her fingers clenched on the metal frame in her lap: the soul reader and the picture that she hadn't dared to look at.

Brave heart, she told herself. Brave heart.


	11. Metamorphosis

Davros was.

He had no body, no senses, no reality. There was nothing to see or to hear or to feel. But he was, he had thought, thought and memory and emotions and power, he was here, he was now, he was still alive, IT HAD WORKED!

"I AM!" he shouted, in ultimate triumph, and he was. Was words and breath again, lips to speak, eyes to see – light.

He was surrounded by endless whiteness, rolling and billowing. It shifted, seeming to ebb and flow as his eyes moved over it. It was aether both more and less than mist: solid and thick, yet so diffuse that his eyes could not see any particles.

His eyes?

He raised his hands and looked at them: fingers and palms and wrists just the same as he remembered, down to the little nick in his thumbnail from clipping it too short yesterday – yesterday? Had it been so little time ago? Was there time, anymore?

His hands were real – or as real as they were going to ever be. He touched his face, ran his hands down his body and found everything familiar, and yet infinitely new. And bare. He frowned: he was here, his body, but not his clothes. Disturbing, that. It suggested that perhaps the Daleks would not be able to enter Eternity with their casings, which would leave them as nothing but little gelatinous blobs that would be of little use to him.

Daleks. He looked around, and saw nothing. Then he – not-looked, reached out with other senses, new senses that had just come into existence within him.

He could perceive a place – under him. Not down so much as below, removed, remote: and what he perceived was reality. The world where he had been born and raised, the reaches of space where he had flown and fought: his native dimension.

And above him, far above, there was a hint of something else...

But his attention was drawn back to his hands. He stared at them, and with a little thrill found that he could see through them: sense through his skin, see the flex of tendons as he bent his fingers, follow the firings of his nerve impulses. He could watch a single impulse as it travelled up his arm, and then into his brain – his vision no longer seemed to originate from his eyes, but could move and point in any direction. He could see his own brain: a cavern of flickering sun-bright energies boiling inside his skull: could actually follow as his attention moved from one part of his cortex to another. But he felt that there was another way he could see his mind.

He concentrated, hard, and suddenly everything changed.

The cavern full of fires darkened, and became a vast and empty blackness, with little piles of memories here and there, connected by cold lines of cognition. Emotions were pale white flames that seemed to dance around them, and he, himself, was a dark and drooling beast that stalked those caverns, clawing at itself, burning itself again and again with the searing flames of hatred and anger and fear, and huddling over his memories.

He wanted to deny what he was seeing, but it was true. This was what he was: a beast in the darkness, eternally alone. But – he did not have to be this way. There, that knowledge of the basic properties of neurochemicals – why were they washed over with hate, hate that rose from those memories bright and awful? There was no reason why that knowledge and that emotion should be so linked as to be fused into one glittering mass, as cruel and frozen as barbed wire heavy with frost.

He remembered sitting in a class and hating the teacher who had humiliated him in front of everyone. And ever since, those memories and that hate had been festering together in his mind.

But that was so illogical! He reached out – not with his hands, but with his will, and experimented with blotting the flames out. They rose again, but then he brushed them aside. He touched his mind, saw the rough corrosion of his negative emotions layered over his entire life, and wondered: what would it be like, what would he be like, once he had cleansed his mind and put everything in order (he could see already great blocks and towers of information that should logically interconnect, but were separated by extraneous feelings and memories).

He felt a new sensation. Without realising how he did it, his attention divided: part of him remained inside his own mind, carefully parting his memories from his emotions, polishing them, ordering them: and another part of him looked at the endless whiteness that surrounded his body. There was something there. Someone, even.

"Nyder?"

"Here, sir," and Davros gasped in sheer delight as his subordinate appeared out of the cloudy white aether. Nyder had transcended! He was not alone!

Nyder was as bare as he was, his nudity striped with scars. He looked exactly the same as he had alive: dark hair neatly combed, his face looking even more naked than his body without his glasses. His eyes were full to overflowing with emotion: passion and excitement, and more. And Davros wanted to know what else was behind those eyes. After all, Nyder was able to touch Davros' emotions with his quills: now Davros could return the favour.

He reached into the other man's mind - and recoiled, finding with cold and certain immediacy that Nyder had painful depths that he had never suspected. Any suspicion he might have had that this was just a figment of his imagination, something that he had conjured up out of nothing, was crushed by the brutal reality of Nyder's mind. In that mind, underneath the rapture of being here, of seeing Davros alive, were terrible things.

The memories of Nyder's training were horrific; the battlefield memories were worse. The endless, grinding nausea of fighting and working and sleeping under the constant threat of sudden death…Davros had never known anything like that, not to this degree. He had feared assassins, political machinations, mistakes by his subordinates: he had never feared everyone that was not him, wanted to see the whole world dead so that he would be safe…well, perhaps he had felt that way sometimes. But not in years, not for many long years...finding that feeling in the other man's mind was more than disconcerting. He had thought that only he felt that way.

But there were other things co-existing with the horror: strength of will, coldly analytic judgement, and discipline: discipline like a field of swords, like a million compass needles eternally pointing true. Discipline and loyalty, eternally entwined in Nyder's mind. It was enthralling, to see that amazing loyalty and know that it was under his complete control.

But these parts of Nyder's mind were too frightening. Too alien – or perhaps not alien enough. He pulled away, and then returned, searching for a subject that was certain to be more pleasant. Sex.

That was - strange. An initial linking of sex with abuse and power and pain; a long string of brief mechanical encounters with various men; and then - it was like watching a dead branch suddenly burst into blossoms heavy with dew and ripe with perfume, with colours so bright they seemed to bleed. After Nyder met Esselle, after he started bedding her, every encounter was unique and sharp, and each better than the last one.

There were some interesting diversions - they had been doing what to each other under the table at the staff meetings? No wonder Nyder was the only one who never appeared bored.

And then there had been one particular night with Esselle (her prone and shivering across their bed, him patiently working his way into her, finger by well-lubricated finger, retreating and then penetrating, turning his hand, moving with exquisite slowness as she stretched and clenched around him, and just at that most shockingly intimate moment when he felt himself gloved in her hot flesh to the wrist, and saw the look of triumph on her face, Ravon walked in and half-shouted, "What are you doing?"

Nyder looked over his shoulder, and in the perfect tone of exasperation with just a hint of dismissal, told him, "I dropped something."

"What?" Ravon said, and then sat abruptly on the floor, laughing so hard he couldn't speak. He had paled at the first sight of them; now his face was as red as his headband. "What, what?"

"Ha," Esselle laughed, once, and then held herself silent and shuddered, rib cage jerking in what was not quite panting. Sweat gleamed across her breasts. "Please," she finally whispered, too fast, "don't make me laugh. It hurts when I laugh."

Nyder laughed for her, as he began the slow and careful and unutterably pleasurable process of withdrawing.)

But while there were plenty of memories of Nyder making love to Esselle, or to Esselle and Ravon both, there were no images of him with any other women. Odd; he was Davros' second in command, who would dare refuse him? Davros had certainly taken the first opportunity to have every Daughter in the post-war Bunker, and any other woman who attracted him.

But for Nyder, there was - no, there it was, he had slept with another woman. A small room, the air sharp with the smell of medical disinfectant, an examination table, his bare skin, her hands on him, her red-brown hair spread out as he mounted her, staring in her face and-

"You coupled with Shan!" Davros' mouth was wide. He focused his eyes back on Nyder, and saw him rapt and burning with some indescribable knowledge.

Davros suddenly wondered if Nyder had been reading his mind. And - what had he found there?

"Ten hundreds. I impressed you," he said.

"What?" Davros asked. His newly sharpened mind flashed down the tracks of his memories, remembering the one time he had heard those words, even as Nyder went on speaking.

"In the Bunker, when I was a Security Trainee. When I told you that the teachers had never taught me any numbers above the hundreds, and how I made up my own numbers. You realised that I had known about mathematics, known about it without being properly taught, and I," he raised his scarred hands and pressed them to Davros' face, "impressed," he leaned close, "you." And Nyder kissed him, hard.

The aether burned, and thunder rolled around their ears. They did not notice; there was only each other. The crackling energies that rippled over their new-born bodies and washed hot and alive around them were as nothing to them. They were each other; there was themselves together; and that was all and everything.

After a too-long time that was not nearly long enough, they pulled back far enough to see each other's ecstatic faces. "You made it," Nyder finally whispered.

"We made it," Davros replied, running his fingers through Nyder's hair. Then he frowned minutely. "This all seems to be natural now."

"So it does," Nyder agreed, touching his hair as well. "I thought that only living tissue might transcend-?"

"No, no, hair is dead tissue. Most of yours was artificial."

"I seem to have re-created myself in my own image...Yours has gone all white, you know."

"Has it?" Davros squinted, concentrating, and with jerky unease moved his point of view around, and looked. "Well, so it has. I always rather liked my white hairs." He smiled, and saw himself smile.

Nyder stepped back a pace, and ran his eyes over his raised arms. Then he froze, staring at his hands, still slathered with scars but bare of gloves - or rings.

"Ravon. Ravon!" he suddenly shouted, and his voice vanished without echoes. "Esselle! Answer me!"

Davros quirked one eyebrow, and Nyder noticed.

"No, they must be here, they must have transcended with us. I felt them, we felt them! They were right here..." Nyder spun around and saw nothing but endless whiteness. "Where are you? Ravon! Esselle!"

"Fuses, Nyder," Davros said softly, and then flinched back as Nyder impaled him with a gaze as sharp as steel.

"Explain," he said a little too slowly, and his lips writhed back from his teeth as Davros answered.

"Their role in the Rite was to absorb excess energy. Their neural arrays were wired directly to the ascension engine buffers, and mine was not. It was always a part of the calculations that their channelling of the appropriate energies could be fatal. And they knew what they were doing, and so did you!" This a bit sharper, matching his steel to Nyder's. "You knew that you might not survive, and still you attended on me!"

"I-" but whatever retort Nyder had ready was interrupted by an answer to his calls.

"We are here."

The voice was not a Kaled voice. Four Daleks glided forward out of the aether, casings shining like gleaming grey gems, eyestalks and weapons in perfect alignment. Davros smiled impossibly wide at the sight of them. They were the first sign that his experiment had been successful in forcing non-living matter to transcend.

"Excellent," he said. "Now we can begin. We will need to plan a preliminary sensor sweep-"

"We must locate and exterminate all sentient life on this plane of existence," the Dalek blatted, interrupting Davros. "We must control this dimension! All other life forms are to be exterminated!"

Davros was so startled that he didn't even attempt probing the Dalek's mind; instead he stared, in shock at this unexpected rebellion.

The Dalek moved forward, its weapon now frankly menacing Davros. "You are unarmed. There are no Reflectionists to protect you; no Daughters of Skaro to divert us. You will obey. Obey! Obey!" The Dalek dropped its weapon to point at Davros' legs, and fired.

It had meant to fire a paralytic ray, most likely, but what emerged from the gun barrel was a hundred times more potent. A river of impossibly deadly fire that shrieked through the aether – and passed straight through Davros' flesh, leaving no mark.

There was a long silence after this futile attack.

"Now that's interesting," Davros said. He raised one hand and pointed a single slim finger at the Dalek, concentrating. The aether around his fingertip glowed, and then a similarly deadly ray lanced from it, slicing through the Dalek's casing and out the other side – with no apparent affect. There was no molten metal, no scream of dismay from the Dalek. It just sat there, staring, as did its three fellow Daleks.

"Stalemate," Davros said appreciatively.

"We are the superior life forms. We outnumber you." The Daleks slid forward, as though to catch Davros between their casings, and then froze.

Davros froze as well, feeling a cold black tickling shadow at his back. A familiar sensation: Nyder's quilling, using his enhanced nervous system to touch another living being's. But the sensation was shatteringly distinct now, not a vague brushing against the nerves. Apparently, Nyder's quilling had been enhanced, just as the Dalek's weapon had. And even in normal space, Nyder could easily reach through a Dalek's casing and touch the flesh inside...

There was a muffled sound from the distance, almost the sound of a smothered laugh grown huge. Davros and Nyder looked around themselves, and then up: the Daleks craned their eyestalks upwards as well.

Skaro was a world with two moons, and that is what they thought of now. Two great white shapes hovered over them, too vast to be comprehended, and only by focussing and re-focussing their gazes could they see that the white objects were familiar. In fact, they were faces.

Ravon. Esselle. Faces the sizes of planets stared down at Davros and Nyder, and the four Daleks behind them. They loomed in the mists of Eternity like icebergs. Nyder could see their great naked bodies streaming away from them, as vast as waterfalls to forever but flesh, nonetheless.

"Sorry," boomed Esselle's voice. "We seem to have materialised on a different scale."

A giant hand reached out, fingers curled, and then the finger flick-flick-flick-flicked the Daleks tumbling into space, like a child knocking beetles from the leaves of a favourite plant.

Esselle leaped, neck and breasts and belly flashing overhead, hovering like marble clouds and then shrinking as she fell, contracting, until she was no taller than Nyder, or perhaps a little shorter. Her bare feet softly padded as she walked to Nyder's side and smiled up at him, radiant with joy. Ravon was at his other side, looking the same as before or perhaps a little younger, and his face bright with tears.

Davros pulled back a little, watched the three of them embrace. Ignoring the possible threat of the returning Daleks, he started probing the new arrivals' minds with ruthless thoroughness.

Esselle: a mind of equal power to his own almost, but so different! Where his mind was darkness and chaos, hers was brightly tumbling spires of crystal, full of light and colour, and all perfectly organised and controlled. A precisely aligned mind, with all its information overlaid and overlapping, like a billion interlocking stained glass windows in every colour of the spectrum and more. Every thought, every emotion, was balanced and interlinked, moving together like an impossibly complex machine.

And Ravon! Davros could look into his mind and see a long chain of thought neatly decompiling itself, breaking away and taking great black sheaves of repressions and distortions with it. And the chain was something newly added to Ravon's mind, he could tell.

The study of the Final Rite of Rassilon, the Reflectionist knowledge of the Harvest that had apparently driven Ravon out of his mind – he was shaking the memories and their effects away like water.

I am seeing a madman deliberately become sane, Davros thought to himself. And behind Ravon's madness was a mind not quite as full as Esselle's – she was a Reflectionist after all, her knowledge extended beyond this life and time – but in Ravon's mind were depths of emotion, of feeling, of compassion and empathy, that he could not even begin to measure. Ravon could feel in ways that were completely beyond Davros.

Davros looked at them and felt a deep, unrelenting terror grip at him. Terror, and a seemingly bottomless hatred. And he had no idea why. Everything in him cried out to strike out at them, use his new talents to rend and tear and burn: but instead he reached into his own mind, followed the thread of memory that told him that he had felt like this once before, long ago, very long ago. He was distantly aware that the others were watching along with him as he went back into his memories, back and back and back...

He was an infant. He was weak, weak and soft and uncoordinated. His eyes could only make out blurs; all his senses were confused. Vague 'things' came and gave him warm liquid to drink, or wrapped things around him, or made strange noises that hurt him, or moved him back and forth – once they even frighteningly raised him up, away from the white surface that was all he had ever known.

His infant mind had just started to coordinate itself, and had managed to group the 'things' into entities other than himself: into things that could move when he could not, that could bring warm food or not bring it, that could cover or uncover him.

How he feared and hated them! Hated those Things that could do what he could not. He could barely raise his own head up, and his arms and legs were limp flailing things only occasionally under his control, but his tiny infant's face convulsed with infinite hatred whenever one of the Things came near him. A part of him would never stop hating.

I hated them because they were Other: because they could do what I could not, Davros thought. Now I am here, in Eternity, with Nyder who is stronger of spirit, Esselle with her marvellous mind and Ravon with the depth of his heart. All of them are greater than me, in some way. All of them can do things that I cannot do.

But I do not need to hate them. They don't hate me. They love me.

And I love them.

With that thought, Davros felt the death-grip of his infant hatred fade away. He gave up that weight he had borne all his life, and felt it slip from him like chains that had bound him, smoke that had stifled his senses, walls that had hemmed him in, and him all unawares. His hatred had been the eclipse, darkening his entire life: now the light was free, burning like the core of a sun.

With that thought, Davros grew up.

He reached out for them, for his beloveds, with hands and heart and mind and all his soul, and they reached for him in turn. Their eight hands met and they formed what all of Davros' machines had barely been able to achieve: an energy wave that could raise a man, or a thousand men, or an army and all its ships, from one dimension to another. An engine for Eternity.

They were together: Davros' intellect, Nyder's discipline, Esselle's precision and Ravon's compassion, all of them working together as one, and so they wrought:


	12. Eternity

They saw the Dalek-Kaled ships in orbit around Gallifrey; they saw every person, every living soul upon them, and they judged. Energies soared out of them, raining down onto the ships, filling and enlarging and sweeping people and equipment and even whole ships upwards into the dimension where Davros awaited them.

In the great Dance, the energies rose around the dancers like a flood of irresistible power, washing over them. Eyes suddenly ran hot with tears, exhaustion vanished, and every man and woman and Dalek that was a part of that dance felt connected, each with the other, as they were tested for the greatest step forward of their lives.

The Prime rose impossibly high, balanced on the tips of four tines. Her hair rose crackling in a wave of static electricity, and for an instant she blazed like a setting sun. "Warn heaven and hell!" she howled; and the dancers joined their hands and voices, shouting their reply.

"INCOMING!"

And they went on.

Pilot Trilt barely had time to snap the faceplate of his suit closed before the pilot's chair, the control room, and the entire ship dissolved around him. He screamed, a hoarse shout that hurt his ears, and then his training kicked in. He slapped his chest to set the visual/radio beacon to blinking, and oriented himself.

He was in space; around him were other space suited figures, and great white blobs slowly congealing into spheres. That must be the emergency hull breach system, encasing people in oxygen-saturated fungus. He could already see the Kaled shuttles, swooping towards them, pressor beams ready to scoop them up and take them to the remaining ships.

He craned his head and stared at the stars, and wondered if any of them were staring back. If one of those burning lights was an Eternal Davros. He raised his hand to the salute as the pressor beam took him and shoved him to safety.

Inside the ship, a technician pried open Trilt's faceplate as soon as he was in pressure and kissed him – well, actually, the helmet was in the way so she mostly kissed Trilt's nose. "They made it!" she shouted, trying to be heard over the background of laughter and cheers, and the roaring joyous thunder of the drums. "They made it!"

"Yeah, I felt them," Trilt said. It was a pretty flat way to describe feeling that amazing geyser of emotional energy that had swept around and past him, but he didn't have the words to say what it had been like. The technician paused, and Trilt recognised her expression. "No, it's all right. I wasn't plannin' to go on. Not yet. I have too many things I want to do, here, in this life yet."

"Right. Well, the ships are fully cloaked, and the data transfer from the Matrix is almost complete; I'm glad we put in that extra memory, the machines are full to overflowing! Once we have picked up the last of the drifters, we're retreating to an established base, to retool the engines and assimilate the new data."

Trilt had no piloting to do, so he volunteered to help rummage through the blobs of softening fungus. The first person he found was a slender young woman, Sliss, who dazedly declared "I never told Atto I loved her!" and then dashed off to the communications room. The next form he felt was limp, and he sprayed the repeller dust with more vigour than before. If a dancer had fallen and been injured just as the ship disappeared...

The form was male, stretched out across the steel deck as though leaping. Trilt squatted on his heels and stared at the man, and hardly noticed the medtechs gathering beside him.

"He's dead," Trilt finally muttered. "But he's still here. And his face..."

The man's face was lit with joy, joy that had written itself into every line of it; his teeth were bared in a beaming smile and his eyes stared, upwards, to something none of them could see. His arms were flung wide as though he was running to embrace someone.

"Yes. Apparently he had another destination," whispered a medtech, before they carried the body to one side for later ceremony. More than one of them found an excuse to brush their fingertips to their lips and then brush the corpse's mouth in turn, passing on a kiss of silent respect.

* * *

The new Eternals were on Gallifrey: they saw themselves vanish, saw the three aliens at the centre of the Panopticon platform scream as their souls were pared by the Rite. They amused themselves by reeling time backwards and forwards, debating exactly which one of them had transcended first. Then they went to work.

The great flood of Time Lords souls that billowed forth from the Matrix were guided, cajoled, prodded, and otherwise convinced that the path of their travel should pass through the ascension engines that made up the core of the Dalek-Kaled ships. Those souls rose free, past Eternity and into the final plane that was their destination, and the soul-inertia of their passage charged the great spiritual flywheels of Davros' creations with unprecedented power. (Only Rassilon knew why the Time Lords were unable to become Eternals, but so had he made them). They left behind the weight of their knowledge, in gratitude or in relief. And Davros copied that information, faster than the mind could follow, and sent it to be imprinted in the computers of the Fleet. The whole of the Matrix, its histories and biodata and records, was his for all time.

Four Daleks had ascended during the Rite; now they judged and weighed the rest, and found many of them wanting. Those were teleported into Gallifreyan orbit, for pick-up, further training and evaluation. But some were ready to be lifted to the next plane, and they lifted them. They reached out and seized the four hovering swords, feeling their essences hot with blood and slaughter, and sent them onwards. They took their machines as well: machines that had been worked on so many times, by so many hands, that they were nearly as complex as living beings, or more so. And after the Doctor and his companions stumbled out of the Panopticon, more changes were made.

The Kaleds' empty clothing rose, and vanished; the President's robes and regalia rose as well, to go arrange themselves neatly on the appropriate stands and brackets. The long gouges torn into the floors of the Citadel by the Daleks' passage were erased, and the shattered doors were repaired. Computers were altered, surveillance records were deftly rewritten. Every physical trace of the invasion was blotted out, with sublime deftness and accuracy. And channels were hidden deep within the Matrix, to allow Davros to subtly influence it.

People just beginning to wake were moved and rearranged (their floating bodies filled the corridors for a fraction of an instant, like particularly well-dressed zombies whose feet happened to never touch the ground). Flavia would awaken in her own bed: Leela would awaken in hospital, seated by her husband's bedside where he was resting after having his broken leg repaired. The fungus would have inhibited the formation of long-term memories, so the awakening Time Lords would not be quite sure what had happened. It pleased the new Eternals to calculate how long they would procrastinate before admitting that the universe had gone on working without them in constant attendance on it.

Outside the Citadel, a little robot dog who had been grimly gliding up a rough dirt incline suddenly stopped and made a sharp electronic noise of distress. Under his casing there was a sudden sizzle of heat and a wisp of smoke as a levipropulsion unit vanished, along with a certain amount of alien circuitry. His internal sensors quickly recalibrated, but could not find the source of the fault. He paused, wondering how he had gotten outside the Citadel. He was near the door that the Mistress used when she went to visit the Outsiders. There was even a stone overhang so that he would not be exposed. K-9 rolled to this shelter, set his radio frequency to contact the Mistress, and waited. While he waited, he carefully reviewed what had happened.

But there was nothing to review.

* * *

When Turlough opened the door of the TARDIS, Davros was waiting eagerly at his side, invisible and immaterial, as excited as a bridegroom on his wedding day. Before the doors were open more than a fingerwidth, Davros was inside, and instantly he was everywhere at once. He introduced himself, paid rapturous homage to the TARDIS, showered her with flattery, praised all of her actions singly and as a whole, kissed and adored every inch of her circuitry, kissed Kamelion as well in passing, introduced himself again and admired the robot. When Tegan and the Doctor fought, he was watching; when she demanded to leave, he opened the time corridor and sent her home, his eyes lingering on her arms to the last.

And while he was in the TARDIS, he was also reviewing the Matrix databanks, and cleansing his own mind, and sharing in all the memories and pains and joys of his fellow Eternals, and starting the foundation and keels of great ships in Eternity that would bear him and his machines and his people. And he was on Skaro as well! He stood at the highest peak of the Drammankin Mountains, in the bitter cold and the howling winds, and he howled back (and ignored the mountain climber who fell back in shock at the sight of the naked man standing at the most inaccessible peak).

He was in the Bunker, scribbling news of his ascension on every whiteboard. He was in the fields, watching the sunlight flicker through the green leaves, running through the great fields of grain and feeling the stalks patter against his flesh. He was on the moons, feeling the millennia-dry dust against his feet and the sweet sting of vacuum on his skin. He was on Skaro's sun, treading on its boiling surface, watching mountains of fire rise and fall.

He was everywhere, and Time and Space echoed to his laughter. And he was not alone. Ravon and Nyder and Esselle were with him, with him and apart.

Ravon had soared across Skaro with Davros, but now he tried moving in time as well as space. He went back, back along his own memories, and returned to the bitter heart of his worst nightmares.

The battle of Ges Plateau. A battle that ground two generations of soldiers, Kaled and Thal, into red slurry indistinguishable from mud except for the occasional stray tooth. The night was alive with the screams of the dying, with the stench of blood and burnt flesh and gunpowder and nerve gasses. Specialised weapons had been deployed by both sides, stripping nerves and shattering minds at a distance. The air was so thick with smoke that no stars could be seen: a hand could not be seen in front of the face, and to show the slightest light, from match or lantern or torch, was to become the instant target of a hundred bullets.

Ravon was there, in the dark. He was here in the flesh as well, a young Brigadier Ravon, dashing along the trenches, calling encouragement to his men, deploying them to reinforce or attack and always to their deaths, grasping their hands and swearing to send medical help that was not available, that would never arrive. Ravon the Eternal stayed with the wounded, with hundreds of men at once; they felt his hands warm on their cold ones in the dark, accepted the succour of his kind words, and with trembling eagerness left their bodies and spiralled upwards, on to Eternity, or beyond.

Nyder had also taken up the line of his life and followed it. From the saucers to the Bunker, to the culling ward and the battlefield, and further. The training barracks. The children's barracks. Further yet, until his infant self vanished, and instead there was a short hatchet-faced woman, with trembling arms and a grossly swollen belly, who leaned against the blank wall of a vast room and stared at the circular track worn into the stained tiles by walking feet.

She was supposed to be out there, walking, along with the other pregnant women. It was her duty to be strong, to exercise her body, to bear strong sons to fight in the war. She could see the other women walking, their feet patiently whispering against the white tile, but she was so tired. Her back hurt like it was broken, and her bowels felt hideously disarranged. And it would be a long time, too long, before she was ready to go to the Infant Production Centre and be relieved of her burden. Right here and now, she wanted only to rest...

Nyder saw her, her sunken eyes, her thick vein-roped calves, her hair almost exactly the same shade of brown as his. And he loved her, the mother he had never seen until this moment.

"It will be worth it," he whispered silently to her, and a part of her heard, and believed. She pushed herself away from the wall with a thrust of her elbows, and staggered only a little before falling into the rhythm of the march. She went on.

Esselle was in space. In the silent heart of vacuum she hovered, her eyes fastened on a single yellow sun and the brilliant multicoloured speck of light by it, the light of a green world, the place of her true origin. Earth.

"Mother," her lips shaped the words. "We're coming."

* * *

They had already created great vessels, transfigured saucers that could travel through time and space and Eternity; and which bore all the knowledge of Davros and the Daleks and the Time Lords as well. Needless to say the ships were larger on the outside than the inside; and built alongside the great banks of energy condensers and weapons arrays there were endless libraries and soaring skies and deep silent forests and deserts bellowing with heat and wind. Environments and places from across the galaxy, recreated for the pleasure of the Eternals.

Davros was on those ships. And a part of him was greeting all of the newly arrived Eternals, and chastising a certain four returning Daleks (they seemed quite quiet at the moment, politely volunteering to proceed with their labours which mollified Davros not at all: he was going to have to keep an eye on them, especially if they and their ascended brethren started uplifting other Daleks en masse). He was welding the ships' seams, and building the engines, and testing the computers, and designing the laboratories. And a very large part of his attention was on one ship. Where he stood below a circular crystal port set into the hull and stared upwards.

Upwards, and also outwards, above and beyond: sensing another dimension, something higher than Eternity. Something greater. And streaming past his wondering eyes was the great glowing deluge of the Time Lords souls, freed from the Matrix and flowing away.

Mingled with those souls were other lights, the lights of souls that were familiar. Davros' eyes followed one such light, a brilliance alive with colour, as it moved with swift deliberation towards – someone – who moved to greet it.

"And that is...?" he softly asked.

"Kallik," Esselle whispered. "He is going back to Moam. He is going home." Now that he knew the name, Davros could sense the essence/gestalt/soul of the determined young soldier, taste his eager longing, feel his gratitude and love sweeping behind him like a comet's tail.

When Kallik and Moam met, their union was bright enough to outshine all of Eternity for a moment.

"Oh," said Davros, staring up at the inconceivable glory that was two souls becoming one. "Oh…I did that."

"We did that," said Esselle, from his side; Nyder and Ravon were there as well, all four of their faces turned upwards. They watched as that truly cosmic union gleamed, and then disappeared: moving beyond their perception and to that realm that waited beyond Eternity.

Davros closed his eyes, carefully storing the memory of that beauty warm in his mind, and then brought himself back to the present. It was really time that he put some proper clothes on. He concentrated, and instantly the crisp white cloth of a Scientific Elite uniform wrapped itself around him. A perfect fit, of course; impervious to any physical or energy attack; and very smart. Now he was all in white, from head to foot, with only his dark eyes as startling contrast.

Nyder clothed himself as well: not in the space-adapted uniform of the Kaled-Dalek Fleet, but in the black jacket and jodhpurs of his old uniform as Security Commander. The white embroidered eye on his collar seemed to glow, and his hazel eyes had a rather disquieting gleam in them as well as he eyed Davros.

"You are keeping your scars," Davros said lightly; he could not see them, but he could sense them, ragged lines cut into Nyder's flesh, and standing in surgical rows along his arms.

Nyder raised those arms, and for a moment striations seemed to glow through the cloth like circuitry. "These scars...Slai gave them to me, and Cennell. Slai when he rescued me from the culling ward, and Cennell when he rebuilt my hands." He flexed those hands now, properly clad again in sleek black gloves. "Slai died, and saved my life. And – I killed Cennell."

His eyelids drooped for a moment. "Yes, they will stay, I think." Then he turned to Ravon, whose clothing was a rippling boil around him. The blue uniform of a General appeared, then faded and lost its insignia; the blue suddenly ran the red of the Daughters, and then he materialised something that none of the others had ever seen him wear.

It was a long red robe, with an asymmetrical fastening up the front, belted with a broad red sash that matched his headband. There were unsettling lights behind that headband, as though Ravon's neural implants were slightly glowing (Davros looked at himself, but so far as he could see that wasn't happening to him). The robe was distinctly military on top, with epaulets and crisp cuffs and a high collar snapped tight to the neck; and loose and flowing underneath, brushing the tops of Ravon's bare feet.

"What are you wearing under that?" Nyder wondered aloud.

"Why don't you look for yourself?" Ravon answered, gripping the cloth in his fists and pulling it tight over the front of his body, demonstrating that he was apparently wearing very, very little under the robe.

Then all of their attentions were drawn to Esselle. She stood expectantly looking back at them, dressed in her own Security Liaison uniform: plain black, with a red armband and red hexagons on her collar. But the armband and collar embroidery now seemed to be smouldering, giving off a faint mist of glowing red particles. Her white face glowed with happiness and a faint air of mischief.

"So – what do you think?" she said, holding out her arms as though inviting them to admire her. The three men looked at her with mild looks of puzzlement, and she elaborated, "Of the new me."

"Nothing appears different," Davros said doubtfully.

"Your arse is bigger?" Ravon guessed.

"No, it's my feet. See? They're smaller!" She held out one booted foot.

"Oh, yes. It's very nice," Nyder offered. Esselle's expression was exasperated; clearly he hadn't even noticed.

"Attend on me," Davros ordered, and the three obediently turned to him. He could sense the new Eternals on the rest of the ship and on the other ships turning as well, no matter their location, to listen to him.

"We are here; now we must work. We will create weapons, sensors, improved engines, energy reserves. Extensions of ourselves. We need to learn to coordinate our own energies, to work together in harmony. The information from the Time Lords' Matrix must be indexed and reviewed, for assimilation into our own databanks. Eternity needs to be charted for travel paths, energy densities, potential dangers. We need to locate the Black Guardian and the White, and monitor them for possible future action – if necessary. And we have to experiment. We have great works ahead of us, all of us."

He smiled and looked at them, all of them everywhere, Kaled and Dalek. And these three too, the three closest to his heart. "And after we are done with the first stages, let's," he reached out and touched Nyder's hand, "let's dance."

In the centre of the abyss, the Kaleds and the Daleks danced. Their music shook the aether with bells and cymbals and drums and strange instruments just created from nothing, and their movements thundered against Time. Their cries of joy and wonder echoed where there had been no echoes before. And strange and nameless and powerful things hovered in Eternity and watched, wondering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOTES ON THE TALE:
> 
> The Eternals were introduced in the Fifth Doctor story 'Enlightenment'; the theories presented herein about their nature and the nature of that Eternity in which they dwell are strictly my own.
> 
> Chapter 4 - When Leela left the Doctor for Gallifrey, she took with her K-9 Mark I, who has been on Skaro and had his circuitry tampered with by the Daleks. This is why he obeys Nyder.
> 
> Chapter 6 - The Master was on Gallifrey previously for the events in 'The Five Doctors.'
> 
> Chapter 7 – Kaleds, being advanced folk, apparently have cell phones; although they would probably call them portable audio lines or ‘lines, not cell phones.
> 
> Chapter 8: "We are the products of intelligent design." – well, somebody had to say it.  
> "Slide" – my Fight Club in-joke for the hour.
> 
> Chapter 9: Why did Rassilon say "Hello again" to Davros? I do so wonder where they had met before.
> 
> Chapter 10 – Everyone forgets Kamelion; I'm glad to bring it to the fore for a change.
> 
> Anyone who wants a refresher on what Davros looks like now need only research photos of actor Michael Wisher, whose hair turned most glorious silver as the years went by. You never forget your first Davros...
> 
> Uluru is the original name for Ayers Rock.
> 
> Eliza AKA Elizabeth Summerfield AKA Cousin Eliza is from the Bernice Summerfield audio series, although I first encountered the character in the Magic Bullet audio series 'The True History of Faction Paradox.'
> 
> Chapter 11 – The horrific memories of Nyder's youth that Davros sees are told of in "The Man Who Would Be Nyder."
> 
> Unexpected fisting humour is always unexpected, but I couldn't think of any way to warn for it that wouldn't ruin the joke or raise expectations unnecessarily.
> 
> It's taken a very long time for Davros to mature, like a fine wine. We shall have to see how his new status affects the Universe in general – for the better or for the worse...
> 
> I rather imagine that the four Daleks who make the initial Ascension would, in another universe, have become the Cult of Skaro. And who knows? They may still.
> 
> Chapter 12 - "Warn Heaven and Hell: a Daughter has died!" is a traditional Reflectionists death cry; here it is slightly rewritten for the circumstances.


End file.
